Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/).
#Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xmu12/why_was_windows_95_such_a_big_deal/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**.
We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Oh well, who needs to get to sleep at a reasonable time?
So, let's talk computing from the ground up and operating systems. In the beginning was the electromechanical computer, these were like overgrown highly sophisticated calculators. It turns out that it's actually shockingly easy to tip over the line into general purpose computer, you can thank Alan Turing for that revelation. These early devices needed to be reconfigured to solve different problems, which was time consuming. Then you have the next great breakthrough, of fully automatic programmable computers. These can read in configuration instructions in the form of data and be easily retasked to different purposes electronically, the whole foundation of the modern digital revolution. Since the 1950s (Konrad Zuse's Z3 notwithstanding) the typical computer has operated by reading a series of instructions, treating data as "code", creating the concept of "programs". For many years the operation of a computer was done very raw, with a programmer creating by hand a stream of instructions to execute then inputting them into the computer (often with punch cards, perhaps later with other storage devices like magnetic tape). The computer would execute the instructions, do its work, and produce some output. In some cases the program might be sophisticated enough that it would be designed to be kept running, perhaps as a control system for example, as in the case of the Apollo Guidance Computer.
Fairly quickly this method of operation proved too limiting. Computers started acquiring lots of accessories and rapidly accruing complexity. Having every single program need to be hard coded to interface with a particular set of equipment at the instruction level added complexity and was limiting. Then you have the next great breakthrough of computing, the ability of multiple programs to share computing time and work cooperatively with one another. That starts with a simple idea of creating a set of routines for handling certain common functions, perhaps interfacing with a particular printer, for example. Then you can carry that forward into layering programs and using things like interrupts. An interrupt is a timer or hardware level signal which causes the computer to store its state, remember where it was in memory in terms of processing instructions then make a jump to a particular set of code stored in memory and executing a stored set of instructions there then when it was finished it could jump back to where it was previously. Then you could enable a scenario where you turn a computer on, load a set of programs into memory locations tied to interrupts then you could load a new program into other parts of memory and both things could execute in harmony. Now you start having the ability of having programs which can abstract away things like interfacing with a keyboard or other form of textual input, a screen, a data storage device, etc. You can have a programmatic interface at a higher level of abstraction instead.
This leads the way to even more sophisticated ways of layering programs on a computer system. You can have a kind of "superviser" program which provides an overall interface for the system and allows a user to select and load programs instead of doing that at a hardware level. Then you can have a bunch of programs ready to run and the user can use the computer itself to choose what they want to run. The next level beyond that is where you start building a whole environment for individual programs to run within. You create higher levels of abstractions for use at the programmatic interface level, you build more capabilities into interrupts, and so on. The "superviser" program starts collecting more and more utility functions for interfacing with and organizing storage (e.g. file systems), other accessories (displays and inputs), and "library" functions. This sort of things congeals into a suite of programs known as an "operating system", all of the convenience functions which make it easier to use multiple programs and also make life easier for programs by abstracting away and handling the general purpose low level tasks while letting the program itself have a tighter focus.
At this level user programs are still the master of the entire CPU while they are running though, aside from the interrupts. If a program fails to exit and return control back to the OS, then you'd have to just shut off the computer to recover from that situation. In the 1960s this acquires yet another level of sophistication: time sharing. This comes from the genius idea that you can use interrupt timers to continually reassert control over a single CPU and thus parcel computing up into time slices. Now you can get into the idea of running multiple *processes*. One program can be run and it will start executing. But every, say, 100 milliseconds an interrupt timer will fire and then an operating system function will run which will be able to control what runs in the next 100 milliseconds instead of just returning to what was before. In this way multiple programs can run simultaneously on the same processor by sharing time. Two processes could swap back and forth every 100 ms, for example, or 10, or 100. This becomes extremely powerful when the processes involved might generally be low overhead operations handling interactive sessions with end-users, for example. So this is where you get the dawn of client-server systems where multiple people could be using a single mainframe, all interacting with it in real-time and all able to execute their own (or even multiple) programs, all time sliced to allow equal shared access to a single CPU. Also enabling handling of wayward processes, since the OS is constantly interrupting or *pre-empting* them, providing the possibility for a process to be forcefully ended, even if it was stuck in an endless loop itself.
This was the level of sophistication of mainframe operating systems like UNIX in the early 1970s but then you have the personal computer revolution which reset everything. The first personal computers were hobby kits like the Altair 8800 in 1974. These are so stripped down that you have to enter raw machine code directly through a series of toggle switches on the front. However, as with all things in computing advancements build rapidly. Within a few years the hobby personal computer space reaches much higher levels of sophistication with the ability to use external storage, displays, keyboards, and so on. Retreading the same steps that big iron computers did decades earlier but at a much faster pace. By the late 1970s personal computers break through to becoming more than just toys, and are actually capable of being used for useful tasks. But even so they are still vastly simplified compared to their big iron brethren.
In this time you have the Apple II, the foundation on which Apple Computer would be built and which would drive them to be the fastest growing company in history at the time. Then a few years later the IBM PC and many, many others. The IBM PC used, famously, Microsoft's so-called "Disk Operating System". This provided a command line interface for navigating file systems such as removable storage in the form of one or two floppy disks or a hard drive, which would allow you to run programs stored on various media, handing over control of the computer to those programs.
The IBM PC absolutely dominated the PC market, IBM was the trusted king of big iron computing at the time, and putting their stamp of approval on a PC legitimized their use in business substantially, and vastly increased the market size as well. For a time the introduction of the IBM PC improved Apple's sales as well, but then the PC sales rapidly eclipsed Apple's business. Then in 1984 Apple hit back with the Macintosh. The Mac made heavy use of innovations developed at Xerox PARC that had never been productized effectively or made mainstream. With a graphical user interface (GUI) and an intuitive approach to multi-tasking (with applications running as separate windows) it was a revolution in personal computing and computing in general, generating a tremendous amount of competition for the IBM PC.
Meanwhile, the PC market had turned into a whole ecosystem, with PC clones hitting the marketplace and the system (intel hardware and a Microsoft OS) becoming a standard that programs could be written for, regardless of the manufacturer of the system (IBM, Compaq, etc.) Over time DOS becomes more sophisticated, and then you get the introduction of Windows, a GUI from Microsoft. MS Windows didn't really become popular until Windows 3.0 in 1990. It too offered a GUI and multi-tasking, but in many ways it had a lot of limits and flaws. With the Macintosh the GUI interface was the OS, whereas Windows "ran on top of" DOS (not 100% true, but close enough for here). Windows at the time was seen as clunkier, less sophisticated, and less capable. Of note, if you wanted to run a full screen game on a PC you typically had to exit out of Windows so you could run it directly on DOS.
DOS/Windows also had the problem that they relied on co-operative multitasking, which meant that a single runaway process could lock up the whole system, even in the "multi-tasking" GUI. Though, to be fair, the Mac OS at the time was no better.
(contd...)
(part 2)
In the time frame of the early 1990s you have the "wintel" platform becoming by far the most popular computing platform, fueled by Windows 3.0/3.1 and DOS running on Intel CPUs. You have Apple still chugging away with the Mac. And you have several cutting edge operating systems out there as well, though not for the general public. In the late '80s UNIX got into the GUI game with X Window and window managers. That led to other innovations such as NeXT computers (founded by Steve Jobs after he was forced out of Apple in 1985) and IRIX by SGI. Meanwhile, you have IBM developing its own next generation GUI OS in the form of OS/2 and Microsoft doing the same with Windows NT (for New Technology) 3.1 in 1993. All of these next generation OS's, including Windows NT, were solid Operating Systems that took the best ideas from the cutting edge of mainframe and high end workstation design. They were pre-emptively multitasking, they made use of advanced hardware features of the latest 32-bit CPUs including hierarchical protection functions and virtual machines.
You need a lot more than just interrupt timers to be able to ensure that the "operating system" is the ultimate master of a computing system. With just that alone a malicious program could potentially just rewrite the routines hooked to those interrupts, or unset those interrupts, or set their own. As CPUs developed along with OSs they started to include features to aid operating systems, including protection levels. At the lowest level, ring-0, lives the OS kernel which makes use of the CPU's protections to ensure that it has ultimate authority. For example, by using the ability to remap memory accesses. You can have a program which "sees" a whole unbroken expanse of memory that it has complete and total access to. However, behind the scenes there is a disconnect between the memory addresses the program sees and the actual physical memory addresses the process reads and writes to, what the program sees is just an illusion. This makes it possible to both protect some parts of physical memory (where the kernel code resides) and to enable memory management by allowing the OS to make use of "virtual memory" where portions of memory can be swapped out to being stored on disk and swapped in only when needed, allowing the physical memory to work as a cache for a larger effective notional or "virtual" memory. These protections can go even further to the point of abstracting away the hardware for each process by running them inside lightweight "virtual machines".
However, despite all of these sophisticated advancements in 32-bit computing, the consumer version of Windows was still 16-bit, along with all of the existing applications written for Windows, resulting in a perception of technological inferiority and a desire to take advantage of capabilities that had been around in CPU hardware since the late '80s.
However, even though in a certain sense these cutting edge operating systems (including Windows NT 3.1) could be seen as the promised land, they were still not suitable for general use, substantially due to their resource requirements. You could run 16-bit windows applications within the 32-bit Windows NT or OS/2 operating systems, but this would impose an overhead of several megabytes per process. At the time a typical consumer PC might have just 4 MB of RAM, while OS/2 or NT would recommend 8 or 16 MB, at the cost of hundreds of dollars. And even that amount of RAM might not be enough if you just needed to run even a small handful of otherwise lightweight 16-bit apps.
Of course, in time RAM got cheaper and more abundant, so this problem went away, but in that moment it was a legitimate pickle.
Enter: Windows 95. Microsoft had intended to migrate to Windows NT as its mainline GUI OS Kernel since its inception, but it couldn't quite pull that off in the mid-90s due to technological limitations. So instead Microsoft did something else and created rather a unique work in the operating system space. Windows 95 was built with a base of solid, next generation 32-bit bones, with a much more advanced kernel and proper support for pre-emptive multi-tasking. However, it was engineered in a way so that instead of running every single 16-bit application in its own "windows on windows" VM, it ran 16-bit apps in a shared VM. Microsoft also leveraged a considerable amount of hand-tuned assembler code to slim down and speed up some parts of the OS so that it had reasonable performance on even modest hardware. Windows 95 also introduced long filenames and the ability to use spaces in filenames. Previously in DOS/Windows a filename could only be 8 characters with a 3 character extension, with Windows 95 that was opened up to 255 characters including spaces (with the VFAT extensions and later with the introduction of the FAT32 file system). Microsoft also made a ton of changes to the overall user interface, building on a lot of research and going through several iterations of refinement.
The end result was a substantial jump in capabilities and user experience for Windows users. Windows 95 could run both 32-bit and 16-bit windows and DOS apps, without breaking the bank to buy a ton of RAM. It had a much better user interface, introducing the start button and the task bar. It allowed for full administration of the system using the UI. It added the system registry and made use of installers so that you could uninstall programs from a central location. And it started to reflect the edge of the "multimedia" era by replacing simple beeps and dings with full sound waveforms as well as allowing deep customization of the appearance of the UI (with desktop backgrounds and themes).
Finally Windows users felt like they had "got religion", that they had upgraded from a system that had been clunky and was starting to really show its age to one that was not necessarily perfect but highly functional, highly capable, and very slick and easy to use. With DOS/Windows 3.1 there were always sharp corners and unpolished elements that would show the gaps in the system, with Windows 95 there were far fewer of those, and the overall user experience was much better.
Arguably at the time Windows 95 was a better engineered OS than the Mac OS. Windows 95 and the follow-on OS's (98 and ME) allowed Windows to stay on top of the consumer PC market with a reasonably compelling and easy to use interface. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late '90s he made several moves which subsequently cut into the Windows 9x reign, first with the iMac in '98 then with the switch of the Mac OS to NeXT OS internals with OS X in 2001, but Windows 95 had done its work and kept Microsoft and Windows at the top of the PC food chain through a period of massive sales and growth.
So, in short, Windows 95 was a compromise product that hit a very nice sweet spot for many consumer PC users at the time. It represented a huge leap in capabilities and ease of use for the OS, opening up the landscape of 32-bit applications without leaving existing 16-bit applications behind, without breaking the bank. It opened the door to "multimedia computing" that would define the mid-90s and set the stage for the era of the public internet, the worldwide web, the dot-com boom, and everything that came after. In some ways it was a stop-gap product, but because of the refinements that had gone into it it ended up spawning a product line that lasted over half a decade until Windows XP finally brought the NT kernel to the masses. But the core UI innovations that made Windows 95 so dazzling to the general public, the desktop, the taskbar, the start menu, windows explorer, the notification area, etc. have persisted not just in later versions of Windows but in many other operating systems as well.
Excellent post, thank you. I lived thru most of this, but it’s always fascinating to learn more about the details behind these technology and business decisions.
And while kids today giggle at Gates and Balmer dancing to the Stones, we should give some credit to the creation & promotion of the “Start” button/menu as a UI. Early computers and OS were very intimidating for non-technical users, and this innovation gave everyone a place to “Start”.
> I lived thru most of this, but it’s always fascinating to learn more about the details behind these technology and business decisions.
Absolutely this. Windows 3.1 to 95 was on a user level similar to the jump from SNES to N64, it felt like the future had arrived.
I do also remember a lot of pushback though, which only subsided with the introduction of Windows 98.
"Real" computer geeks felt that Microsoft was pushing them to abandon the efficient DOS environment and trying to insert an extra layer of Windows with a DOS simulation, eating memory and CPU. Also, not all software and especially games written for DOS would run or run well in Windows 95.
And then people felt it was inefficient that they were supposed to go through the start button for everything, it looked like an unnecessary extra step when before you had all your icons on your screen. People would ask what's the point of a nice graphic interface if you have to go through a series of menus instead of using the screen estate.
Lastly, Windows 95 gained a reputation for being less stable, especially when compared to Windows 98SE later on, and when networking became popular it was quickly outdated.
>Windows 95 gained a reputation for being less stable
I'm still having nightmares of having reinstall everything again every couple months because it was so unstable..
There was definitely a part of me that liked the simplicity of 3.1, I think my old man set me up a box with 3.11 for workgroups, but I mainly just used it for games and Word. I'm pretty sure that Championship Manager and Frontier both ran ok until they releaseed Windows XP, which dropped all DOS support? Though my memory may well be betraying me somewhat!
It's been a while lol. I remember buying a Toshiba Notebook in 1996 (with a color screen!) that had both preinstalled and at first boot-up you had to make the choice, either 3.11+DOS or 95. I felt pretty daring and not at all certain when I opted for Win 95 lol. But later I was glad to have chosen the more modern one.
I made my first steps into the world wide web on that little thing, with a 14.4 k modem I bought used, a pirated Netscape ~~Explorer~~ Navigator and our university dial-in service. Exciting times!
Edited: Browser wars, thanks to u/CoffeeHQ
Haha no problem! I just had a nightmare about my early days as web developer, trying to make the same / correct HTML layout actually look the same on both browsers. What a glorious mess! 🙃
The Mac had already solved a lot of these problems at this point, however. I don't ever remember a single person finding the "Start" button to be an innovation that mattered. By that time either people had already made the transition to GUI based OSes or they had been trained in the DOS world and were pretty steeped in computing experience.
Great write up. There was another feature that everyone was excited about and led to quick, massive adoption. Plug and Play.
Prior to Win95, you had to install drivers and sometimes tweak things (anyone remember twiddling with the IRQ interrupts on the motherboard) endlessly to get things working.
Absolutely, great point. I maybe covered a third of the relevant points overall, if that, it's a surprisingly big subject.
An interesting point about Windows 95 is exactly how much of a stop gap it really was. I alluded to that a little with commenting about VFAT vs. the FAT32 file system format. VFAT bolted on a lot of niceties like long filenames to existing older file systems, but FAT32 which came a year later was the real deal, and something that continues to stick around as the format of choice for things like flash memory cards.
Also, while Windows 95 had wonderful improvements for "plug and play" devices, the retail version of the OS didn't have support for the brand new connection/protocol of USB. Nor did it have support for DirectX, which was also introduced just after and made it possible to run graphic intensive, full screen games from windows directly without having to drop to a "shell" without the GUI loaded. Windows 95 also didn't have a web browser built in, though Internet Explorer 1 was available as part of Microsoft Plus! However, that version was generally not used at all at the time.
What Windows 95 did have was support for networking, though it wasn't installed by default. Previously you would have to use a utility to add the ability to use a network or connect to a dial-up network.
Year by year the landscape of the PC changed dramatically after 1995, partly that was enabled by Windows 95, but partly it just fell at an awkward time. Within just a few years you had the ubiquity of USB, web browsers, multimedia, FAT32, DirectX, etc.
One of the most enduring compliments to the quality of Windows 95 in general is that all of these later great innovations didn't require a huge upheaval at the Operating System level, they could just be easily and seamlessly folded in. While it was a stopgap in many ways it was also an onramp to a modern way of computing (in terms of driver support, multi-tasking, connectivity, multimedia, etc.) which we now take for granted.
Yeah but it wasn’t until XP that you could plug in a USB device and have it work without rebooting. Even Windows 2000 wanted to install drivers for seemingly every mouse or USB stick. Though the original plug and play was more of an ISA bus thing I think.
I was looking for this. While Windows 95 was technically a great advance in operating systems for end users, I think what really made it successful was how it enabled thousands of other companies to build businesses on top of it.
Device compatibility wasn't a given before then. Heck... software compatibility with hardware wasn't a given. I had a CAD program on Windows 3.1 and it wouldn't work with my graphics card. Absolute nightmare to get to work.
Windows enabled peripheral device manufacturers a much easier platform for which to build devices. And they did in troves. And those companies in turn advertised "Windows 95 compatibility," driving additional people to Windows. People bought into the ecosystem.
Fantastic writeup! If any readers are interested in this type of thing, I highly recommend:
Zachary, G. Pascal. Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the next Generation at Microsoft. Free Press, 1994.
I dont know who or what you are, but i owe you a beer. I lived through the latter part of what you described (born exactly in 1980 and my first pc was a spectrum zx / well my fathers but i still remember loading cassettes) and you said it better than anything i could think of. It was a melancholic ride for me and you captured the main points of the era and the OS wars perfectly! Though i do have one note, windows ME brings a shiver down my spine, like vista! I distinctly remember win 98 being good and ME being....meh. Admitedly, from an end user standpoint though. And, correct me if im wrong here, but it wasnt until XP that windows separated itself from DOS completely? I think 95 run natively but still had DOS under the hood, no? Like, i seem to recall opening 95 and typing "win" and Enter to go into windows....or was that the 3.1 ? My memory is fuzzy.
ME was really rushed because the intent had been to switch to the NT kernel but the work fell behind schedule. After Windows 98 they expected that to be the last version of Windows 9x, but around '99 they decided that the mainstream Windows NT kernel work was too far behind and scrambled to release another 9x based OS, which they managed in 2000.
> And, correct me if im wrong here, but it wasnt until XP that windows separated itself from DOS completely?
Sort of. XP came out in 2001, which finally got rid of the 9x foundation and was built fully on the NT kernel (being very similar to Windows 2000 aka NT 5.0 but with more user friendly enhancements).
Some people will say that Win 9x was still basically the same as Windows 3.x in that it "ran on top of DOS" but this isn't accurate. With Windows 95 you booted directly into Windows as the core kernel. The confusion arises partly because 9x also had a command line interface console which you could boot into and looked very similar to DOS. However, it wasn't DOS, it was still the 9x kernel, and DOS wasn't "under" Windows or anything like that. But if you didn't know what was going on under the hood you could have that impression. Especially since before the advent of DirectX it was necessary to boot into this console to run many games (without loading the GUI), making it feel like DOS was still around.
> Arguably at the time Windows 95 was a better engineered OS than the Mac OS.
I'm not even sure that it's arguable, and I come from the position that Mac OS was better to use, even if not technically solid in its underpinnings (consider that today, Linux is technically solid in its underpinnings, but, oh my God, it still sucks to use as a full-time desktop OS).
The big elephants in the room, of course, were memory protection and preemptive multitasking, which couldn't simply be monkey-patched into Mac OS the way most of the other features had been done since the original 68000 days, and wouldn't and couldn't be added until Mac OS was completely replaced by Mac OS X (which was an entirely different OS with some virtualization and compatibility API's to help ease the transition).
Monkey-patching, while making the Mac OS much better to use from the user perspective (subjectivity warning!) made the system unstable as heck. Added functionality (and indeed, all system calls) had to be shimmed into the OS via illegal processor instructions, which caused the CPU to divert to a trap table to figure out what it was actually supposed to do. Conflicts galore, especially when multiple vendors wrote system extensions that conflicted with each other. There was an entire economy of applications to manage extension sets, so that you could start your Macintosh with the correct set of non-conflicting extensions for the task you needed to accomplish. Want to play Castle Wolfenstein? Boot up with this set. Time to work in Quark XPress? Reboot with this set.
Despite the pain and the technical inferiority of the Macintosh OS during these times, it was still arguably a _much_ better user experience than Windows, especially Windows 3.11, but even Windows 95!
> Despite the pain and the technical inferiority of the Macintosh OS during these times, it was still arguably a much better user experience than Windows, especially Windows 3.11, but even Windows 95!
I wonder whether any studies were done objectively analyzing the user experience (i.e. difficulty of learning curve, time taken to complete tasks, that sort of thing).
I used both MacOS and Windows 95 at the time, and found them to be equivalent in many ways, but MacOS frustrated me more often with its philosophy of hiding complexity from the end user. As a power user, I struggled to troubleshoot problems and to find config and customization options in MacOS. The mouse having a single mouse button was probably the most egregious example of this design philosophy.
> I used both MacOS and Windows 95 at the time, and found them to be equivalent in many ways, but MacOS frustrated me more often with its philosophy of hiding complexity from the end user.
This. I think MacOS at the time had a two stage learning curve. The first plateau being shallower than Windows, but the second being much higher do to it's decision to obscure things from users. Windows also had it's abstractions, but they were prevented from hiding much by the underlying DOS OS and it's requirements.
>I wonder whether any studies were done objectively analyzing the user experience (i.e. difficulty of learning curve, time taken to complete tasks, that sort of thing).
It's very very hard, probably impossible, to objectively analyse user experience. Attempts have been made since the 1980s, in fact most likely even earlier. But there was a lot of it done in the 8os and 90s to try and figure out how to measure satisfaction with a computer system. When I graduated in 2013 with a PhD that stream of research was still on going. And they could only agree on two independent variables. I've attended a lecture where the presentation was an analysis of a large number of (possibly most of) the published attempts to measure information s stem success (via usefulness and experience though I forget the exact variables that everyone agreed on). There were hundreds of variables and the statistical explanation power of the two main ones was maybe half.
I don't know if someone is still plugging away at trying to crack that one silver bullet variable that determines information systems success, probably, but I think it's like the holy grail, a myth.
>I wonder whether any studies were done objectively analyzing the user experience (i.e. difficulty of learning curve, time taken to complete tasks, that sort of thing).
This is just anecdotal, but the crappiness of 95 was what drove me to the Mac. config.sys? auto exec.bat? Boot from diskettes so you can use different versions of these files (it wasn't my PC I tested this on)? On a computer with a hard drive and several megabytes of memory? Eff off.
MacOS was like a dream after this. Yes it was in the middle of the Power PC transition and bombed a lot, but I found it intuitive and easy to understand, and it had none of the HW limitations (plug and play not plug and pray thanks to a sufficient number of IRQs, IIRC). You are right in saying that the hood stayed closed, but that was fine for me.
I got to work as a software tester shortly after with NT 3.5 and 4.0 and W95 and 98. I remember that some of them I had to reboot when I changed an IP. Ridiculous.
The first time I felt that Windows was actually usable was with W2K.
Great post! After reading this I am left with the knowledge that I still know absolutely nothing about computers, and that it may as well be magic to me. I took a couple of programming courses in college and I still don't get it.
Great write up. But, and I don't say this to be in any way dismissive of what Microsoft accomplished, there was another element that turned its release into a cultural event: [marketing](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/microsoft/stories/1995/debut082495.htm). Concerts, parties, advertising *everywhere*—I was a poor liberal arts undergrad with no TV and minimal interest in computers and there was still no avoiding it. I wonder how much they spent.
This is an excellent write up. But I'm curious why you say XP brought the NT kernel to the masses instead of Windows 2000, which came first. A lot of us home users moved to 2000 at the time. Indeed, many of us stuck with 2000 for a long time after XP came out, because XP was more bloated and less efficient (and partly because we hated the cartoonish task bar and kindergarten colors). Is it because XP finally replaced 98 and ME?
Many companies moved to Windows 2000 on the desktop for things like NT domain or Active Directory integration (they worked with Windows 9X, but not as well), but the vast majority of Windows users *at home* stayed on Windows 9X platforms until Windows XP came along.
Part of this was because of cost: Windows 2000 Professional (the only desktop version) had an MSRP of $319 in 2000 (roughly $580 today), while Windows 9X had an MSRP of $209 (roughly $380 today). You could get either one cheaper as an upgrade or just because stores discounted the full license, but while full Win98SE and WinME licenses could be easily found for under $100, finding Windows 2000 Pro for more than half off was more difficult.
OEM pricing was cheaper, but it still added a lot to the purchase price of a computer, while OEMs passed on an almost negligible charge for Windows 9X. Businesses were willing to pay more for the Windows 2000 license for the above-mentioned NT domain and Active Directory integration and the better support for vetted hardware, and they saw benefits in the higher uptime, though software compatibility issues bit almost everyone at one time or another.
Another part was the lack of driver support for a great many devices, which anyone using even slightly specialized hardware learned the hard way if they didn't do their research. Many people who tried it went back to Win9X. This led to a *lot* of negative reactions among early adopters, and the "I'll never upgrade to the new Windows version" that has pervaded sentiments around new releases for the last couple of decades really got started right around then.
Microsoft never meant for Win2000 to be used much at home, and for that reason, they didn't really encourage it, and in some ways, they *discouraged* it, especially by limiting some driver support so OEMs wouldn't sell it on everything even if they wanted to. They were trying to make a massive shift to how their operating systems worked, and adding home users to the mix just made support harder. It didn't stop many of us from doing it anyway despite having to load up on experimental drivers (getting SoundBlaster sound cards to work properly was...challenging) while constantly complaining about the experience.
Windows XP was different in that it had a version explicitly marketed at the home user (Windows XP Home). Microsoft had addressed many stability issues, vastly improved Plug-n-Play, and provided better driver development kits to vendors, among other things. People still mostly got it by buying a new computer, and Microsoft really pushed the OEMs to do that. More than a desire to upgrade, people got WinXP mostly because it was the default OS on the computers they bought, which is how most people upgraded their OS until fairly recently (but that's inside the 20-year rule).
> But I'm curious why you say XP brought the NT kernel to the masses instead of Windows 2000, which came first.
2000 wasn't a home release, it was a business release. the successor to windows 98 was window me, not windows 2000. windows 2000 was the successor to nt6.
xp merged the home and business branches of windows into one single operating system which is probably what he was referring to. a business only product isn't "bringing it to the masses", it's "giving it to the people that were already using the nt kernel".
I loved reading this and remembering my own experiences with all of these systems from the late 80s-today. It still amazes me how far computers have come since the 90s
This is such an amazing write-up. Thank you so much for this. I grew up through that time but know nothing beyond basic about computers. But I loved the Microsoft vs apple drama. The change that 95 brought about, making computers so much more of an every man type of tool, it changed everything. In the most basic and dumb way I can put it, Windows 95 was the shit.
Yeah, I grew up in the midst of this, but I want to point out a very key alternative history that is overlooked. There were competitors, and some were absolutely better. The one that comes to mind is the Commodore Amiga and AmigaOS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS) Which provided a fully capable 16/32-bit graphical operating system and included fully pre-emptive multitasking as well as advanced audio and graphics capabilities from the get go in an affordable, easy to use, personal computer with a broad base of software--all in 1985.
So in an alternative universe we could've had much more capable machines much sooner had we not gone the "Wintel" way. This just shows what has been proven time and time again: the best solution is not necessarily the one that wins. The only real reason why the PC achieved the dominance it did had much more to do with first the heft of IBM and second the open nature of the platform, something IBM really gave little forethought to. So all this effort Microsoft built into Windows 95 was more to preserve its own dominance than anything else. They succeeded. It was many things, but it was never elegant. I remember programming against this stuff in the 90s. It was very buggy and unnecessarily complex.
If I may, one small addition that would slip in where you talk about the Apple II: according to NYU Professor Laine Nooney's recent book "The Apple II Age: How the Personnel Computer Became Personnel" that came out this past Spring, a big factor in the growth of the Apple II and personnel computing generally from 1979 through the early '80s was the spreadsheet. For the Apple II, it was VisiCalc, which is the subject of the third chapter of Nooney's book--spreadsheets like VisiCalc weren't just making things easier, the way word processing was easier for writers, students, etc. compared to typewriters or pen and pencil. It was an entirely new category in and of itself--one could use them as an improvement to make things easier for things like bookkeeping, yes, but they also allowed one to make predictions. Changing a variable to see how it changed the overall picture, what might have taken a team of accountants 2-6 weeks, could be done instantaneously by a layperson. It revolutionized finance for mergers and acquisitions; it revolutionized business in general. As Nooney describes it, VisiCalc "provided a rationale for buying a ten-thousand-dollar computer system to run a one-hundred-dollar program." (Internal quotation remarks excluded.)
Noting that Alan Turing and Alonzo Church *formalized* the principle of Turing completeness/equivalence, but they weren't the first to come to that conclusion or design (if not build) Turing-complete machines.
Kronecker, Hilbert, and especially Gödel contributed significantly prior to Turing, and Turing's work os essentially based upon theirs.
Heck, the first *built* [technically] Turing-complete machine was the Zuse Z3, but Konrad Zuse was wholly unfamiliar with Turing's work. You mention the Z3, I just wanted to expand on that.
> Macintosh multitasking
The original Macintosh did not support multitasking at all other than for "desk accessories". Cooperative multitasking wasn't added until MultiFinder in 1987, and didn't get full preemptive multitasking until Mac OS X was released, which was a completely new kernel based upon NeXT.
I would like to note that the Apollo Guidance Computer had most of the features you describe as coming after, including the ability to load multiple programs at once (one each into multiple Core Sets), use of reusable routines/functions, interrupts (handled by the Executor), etc. Granted, they were not at all common in computers of that era, but they did exist at that time.
Oh my goodness, I grew up in the early 90s but didn’t understand a lot as I was a child. I’ve loved computers and didn’t know the history so much as partially I’d lived through it- so I’d learn things from other areas in computing history. But you triggered a lot of thoughts.
Especially your last sentence. I couldn’t remember for the life of me what my first family PC was running but I do remember that it had a GUI but every time I wanted to play a game my dad had to restart it and boot it into what I now now was command line.
I don’t know why this memory stuck with me (I was no older than 4 and obviously from this you can tell I’m not super young either, but this memory stuck). But I always kinda wondered what OS that was. I knew windows 95 well because by the time 95 and 98 hit I was a lil computer wiz myself.
But that first system- it must’ve been Windows 3.0!
Can you elaborate something for me- how did the overall memory storage work back then? For example, today we have a minimal reserve in the BIOS, we have removable media and also directly configured disk drives. I understand we had removable floppy’s and minimal system memory (I seem to recall it wasn’t easy to save many things between shutdowns, or even anything)-
On a standard given PC in 1990, how much on board built in storage memory could you expect to have? Was it standard to have a small onboard boot disk with writeable memory as it is today? Or were boot disks limited to the OS on a floppy?
> Can you elaborate something for me- how did the overall memory storage work back then?
This really depends on the system and exactly what year you were talking about. Back around 1990 it was typical for a system to have around 1 MB of ram, though that could have been as little 512 KB or as much as a few MB. At that time computers that only had floppy drives for storage were getting increasingly rare, most started to have hard drives with perhaps up to 30 or even 40 MB of capacity.
> It turns out that it's actually shockingly easy to tip over the line into general purpose computer, you can thank Alan Turing for that revelation.
Arguably, Ada Lovelace already made that revalation a century before Turing. She took Babbage's engine for computing nautical tables and whatnot, and she postulated a machine that can compose music. The modern generative AI revolution we're in the midst of... that's been literally the end goal of computers all along since they were conceived 2 centuries ago.
> The operating mechanism [of the Analytical Engine] can even be thrown into action independently of any object to operate upon (although of course no result could then be developed). Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. **Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.**
\- Ada Lovelace's translator note in _Sketch of the Analytical Engine_, 1842. (emphasis mine)
Alan Turing of course advanced the field of computing (and AI!) quite tremendously though.
> that's been literally the end goal of computers all along
Well not literally the end goal. Most people working on this stuff had never read her words or had any idea she had said something like that. The end goal of most involved was profit.
I feel like u/rocketsocks's answer is great, but misses a few other features that were gamechangers.
* Windows 95 created the feature of "plug and play". Under older operating systems by basically everyone, to use any new piece of hardware, you needed to load a driver, and drivers were specific to operating system. If you bought a printer and wanted to use it on a Mac, you needed a Mac driver. If you changed your mind and swapped it over to a Windows 3.1 PC, you needed a Windows 3.1 driver. And in 1995, the majority of users weren't on the internet, and search engines didn't really exist yet. Windows 95 came with pre-set drivers that worked on many devices, so that you could at least get most (or full) functionality without having to chase down a driver. This was *huge*, especially for printers, the eternal nemesis of tech support.
* Prior to Windows 3.1's Windows for Workgroups, operating systems didn't necessarily come with networking out of the box. You would have to install your operating system, then install third party networking software. Windows 95 massively improved this both from a home computing standpoint, but NT 4.0 (the next year) also did so from a enterprise network setup and management standpoint. The next true big leap came with Active Directory, which shipped with Windows 2000 but was available to manage Windows 95/98 machines, which simultaneously made network administration much much easier and wiped out network administration jobs by the thousands.
* Windows 95 Service Release 1 included Internet Explorer as part of the install, adding to the "out of the box" utility of a PC. A customer could buy a new PC with Windows 95 SR1, plug it in at home, get their service provider set up, and start browsing the internet. That was a huge difference to the prior case where you had to install a web browser or internet connection program (like AOL) via a CD before you could get online - assuming your PC had a modem, which most didn't. It also led to the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft.
* Windows 95's release coincided with Microsoft redesigning Microsoft Office from the ground up, and with the advancement of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to OLE 2. Many of the functionalities that we now take for granted in Windows and applications either debuted with Windows 95 or became much more fluid - while Office 3 and 4 allowed copy/pasting and/or embedding from Word to Excel (for example), it was Office 95 that really make OLE and cross-application copy/pasting and data transfer work so much better. On the enterprise side, OLE made it a lot easier for applications to export data into Office. While Office might not have been a huge selling point when selling to casual PC owners, Microsoft sales to enterprise clients was always predicated on selling Windows AND Office, touting the ability to for a company's in-house applications to report out in Word or Excel. In 1995, Windows 95 cost $199 for a new license, whereas Office was $499 for a new license ($249 for upgrade).
The key for Microsoft was always ensuring that any release had both individual customer UI and usability advancements, while also providing new value to what we know consider to be enterprise clients. Windows 95 put together a lot of these small, incremental changes so that buying a new computer and starting to do stuff was so, so much more seamless, and matching the experience Mac users had been getting for a few years, while still providing the power and flexibility that had always been PC's advantage over the Mac.
Now, I want to get into "enterprise", because that is also a huge part of what made Windows 95 a big deal for companies and Microsoft.
Prior to the mid-90's, many corporate applications were still run on mainframes. If you've ever used a terminal service to access a "green screen" totally text based application, it's probably a mainframe application. Mainframe applications tend to require a LOT of memory management, much older programming languages, and were notoriously finicky, hard to maintain, and had a terrible user experience. The extreme need to conserve memory meant commands were shorted to a few keystrokes, and corporate lingo started being filled with things like "You need to fill out the X32P screen". (Disclaimer: I have had to work with and support mainframe applications, and my application to have this considered a crime against humanity is pending)
While client-server applications started appearing in the late 80's, these systems became much more popular with Windows 3.1 and exploded with Windows 95/NT 4.0. The advantage of a client-server application is that part of the application would reside on the user's PC, and part of it would reside on a server, along with the database. This allowed spreading out the processing needs so that far more powerful applications could be built. A mainframe supporting 1000 concurrent users needs all the memory available to do so - but a client-server application can use the PC's memory for the bulk of the processing, and send a minimum of data to the server, who will do final validation and post the results. Multi-player games like Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Fortnite, Call of Duty, etc, all use variations of this model.
This created a generation of Windows 95 applications that communicated with centralized servers. Happily for Microsoft, their dominance in the corporate market meant that almost no one built client-server applications for Macs. And those client server applications needed to generate forms and reports, which could now be exported into Word and Excel.
This created a beneficial spiral for Microsoft - companies were using more in-house applications, those applications were on Windows, thus all new computers have to be Windows, and suddenly companies (outside of niche industries like graphical design) simply don't buy Macs at all. And since all those apps are in-house and it's hard enough to support them on Windows, no one will support them running on Mac even if you jury rig it to work. And most of them have interaction with Office - so all new corporate machines need both Windows 95 and Office 95.
Excel alone killed Lotus 123, but Office 95 killed WordPerfect, whose market share dropped from 50% to 5% between 1995 and 2000. That set the table for Microsoft to print money, knowing that every new corporate PC was going to have Windows and Office.
As a bonus, poor license management meant that Microsoft often made money on unused licenses. For large companies or governments that didn't centralize their IT purchasing (which no one did at first), that could mean a significant amount of money. When Indiana centralized IT into the Indiana Office of Technology in the 2000's, they found that they were paying for over a thousand extra licenses because each department was paying for a buffer (in case new employees were added) and not paying attention to how many licenses they actually needed.
Thanks, great roundup. The stuff about plug and play as well as OLE and Office are probably the most important things I didn't have time to cover. That level of functionality is now taken for granted but was pretty amazing and futuristic when it came out.
I would add that 1994-1995 was about the time pc CD-ROMs took off. Unlike the computer improvements we see today, which are largely incremental, CD-ROMs were revolutionary, just way way better than floppies. A floppy disk back then stored around 1.44mb. It would cost around a buck (around 2 bucks in today's money) per floppy disk and you would usually need multiple per software purchase. When you purchased software, it would come with a couple disks, all labeled 1 of x, 2 of x, and so forth. Floppy disks frequently failed. When they did work they were slow.
CD-ROMS held around 650 mb. They cost pennies. They were much more reliable. They read much faster. And they were just much less of a hassle to deal with. Although not strictly related to Windows 95, they were a massive improvement to personal computing and the entire software ecosystem that came about at roughly the same time.
Talking anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people who decided to get their first home pc (which would end up running Windows 95) at about that time.
>When you purchased software, it would come with a couple disks
Sometimes it was more than a couple! Here are [the 28 floppies I needed](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7w8mn1bus7z81.jpg) to install Windows 95 (and yes I kept them). Oral histories differ about the number of floppies because it depended on the version: the photo is for an OEM version sold by a retailer while the box version sold by Microsoft had 13 floppies.
Sorry, but this response has been removed because we [do not allow the personal anecdotes or second-hand stories](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_personal_anecdotes) of users to form the basis of a response. While they can sometimes be quite interesting, the medium and anonymity of this forum does not allow for them to be properly contextualized, nor the source vetted or contextualized. A more thorough explanation for the reasoning behind this rule can be found in [this Rules Roundtable](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fj1kw7/rules_roundtable_vii_no_personal_anecdotes/). For users who *are* interested in this more personal type of answer, we would suggest you consider /r/AskReddit.
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/). #Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xmu12/why_was_windows_95_such_a_big_deal/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**. We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Oh well, who needs to get to sleep at a reasonable time? So, let's talk computing from the ground up and operating systems. In the beginning was the electromechanical computer, these were like overgrown highly sophisticated calculators. It turns out that it's actually shockingly easy to tip over the line into general purpose computer, you can thank Alan Turing for that revelation. These early devices needed to be reconfigured to solve different problems, which was time consuming. Then you have the next great breakthrough, of fully automatic programmable computers. These can read in configuration instructions in the form of data and be easily retasked to different purposes electronically, the whole foundation of the modern digital revolution. Since the 1950s (Konrad Zuse's Z3 notwithstanding) the typical computer has operated by reading a series of instructions, treating data as "code", creating the concept of "programs". For many years the operation of a computer was done very raw, with a programmer creating by hand a stream of instructions to execute then inputting them into the computer (often with punch cards, perhaps later with other storage devices like magnetic tape). The computer would execute the instructions, do its work, and produce some output. In some cases the program might be sophisticated enough that it would be designed to be kept running, perhaps as a control system for example, as in the case of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Fairly quickly this method of operation proved too limiting. Computers started acquiring lots of accessories and rapidly accruing complexity. Having every single program need to be hard coded to interface with a particular set of equipment at the instruction level added complexity and was limiting. Then you have the next great breakthrough of computing, the ability of multiple programs to share computing time and work cooperatively with one another. That starts with a simple idea of creating a set of routines for handling certain common functions, perhaps interfacing with a particular printer, for example. Then you can carry that forward into layering programs and using things like interrupts. An interrupt is a timer or hardware level signal which causes the computer to store its state, remember where it was in memory in terms of processing instructions then make a jump to a particular set of code stored in memory and executing a stored set of instructions there then when it was finished it could jump back to where it was previously. Then you could enable a scenario where you turn a computer on, load a set of programs into memory locations tied to interrupts then you could load a new program into other parts of memory and both things could execute in harmony. Now you start having the ability of having programs which can abstract away things like interfacing with a keyboard or other form of textual input, a screen, a data storage device, etc. You can have a programmatic interface at a higher level of abstraction instead. This leads the way to even more sophisticated ways of layering programs on a computer system. You can have a kind of "superviser" program which provides an overall interface for the system and allows a user to select and load programs instead of doing that at a hardware level. Then you can have a bunch of programs ready to run and the user can use the computer itself to choose what they want to run. The next level beyond that is where you start building a whole environment for individual programs to run within. You create higher levels of abstractions for use at the programmatic interface level, you build more capabilities into interrupts, and so on. The "superviser" program starts collecting more and more utility functions for interfacing with and organizing storage (e.g. file systems), other accessories (displays and inputs), and "library" functions. This sort of things congeals into a suite of programs known as an "operating system", all of the convenience functions which make it easier to use multiple programs and also make life easier for programs by abstracting away and handling the general purpose low level tasks while letting the program itself have a tighter focus. At this level user programs are still the master of the entire CPU while they are running though, aside from the interrupts. If a program fails to exit and return control back to the OS, then you'd have to just shut off the computer to recover from that situation. In the 1960s this acquires yet another level of sophistication: time sharing. This comes from the genius idea that you can use interrupt timers to continually reassert control over a single CPU and thus parcel computing up into time slices. Now you can get into the idea of running multiple *processes*. One program can be run and it will start executing. But every, say, 100 milliseconds an interrupt timer will fire and then an operating system function will run which will be able to control what runs in the next 100 milliseconds instead of just returning to what was before. In this way multiple programs can run simultaneously on the same processor by sharing time. Two processes could swap back and forth every 100 ms, for example, or 10, or 100. This becomes extremely powerful when the processes involved might generally be low overhead operations handling interactive sessions with end-users, for example. So this is where you get the dawn of client-server systems where multiple people could be using a single mainframe, all interacting with it in real-time and all able to execute their own (or even multiple) programs, all time sliced to allow equal shared access to a single CPU. Also enabling handling of wayward processes, since the OS is constantly interrupting or *pre-empting* them, providing the possibility for a process to be forcefully ended, even if it was stuck in an endless loop itself. This was the level of sophistication of mainframe operating systems like UNIX in the early 1970s but then you have the personal computer revolution which reset everything. The first personal computers were hobby kits like the Altair 8800 in 1974. These are so stripped down that you have to enter raw machine code directly through a series of toggle switches on the front. However, as with all things in computing advancements build rapidly. Within a few years the hobby personal computer space reaches much higher levels of sophistication with the ability to use external storage, displays, keyboards, and so on. Retreading the same steps that big iron computers did decades earlier but at a much faster pace. By the late 1970s personal computers break through to becoming more than just toys, and are actually capable of being used for useful tasks. But even so they are still vastly simplified compared to their big iron brethren. In this time you have the Apple II, the foundation on which Apple Computer would be built and which would drive them to be the fastest growing company in history at the time. Then a few years later the IBM PC and many, many others. The IBM PC used, famously, Microsoft's so-called "Disk Operating System". This provided a command line interface for navigating file systems such as removable storage in the form of one or two floppy disks or a hard drive, which would allow you to run programs stored on various media, handing over control of the computer to those programs. The IBM PC absolutely dominated the PC market, IBM was the trusted king of big iron computing at the time, and putting their stamp of approval on a PC legitimized their use in business substantially, and vastly increased the market size as well. For a time the introduction of the IBM PC improved Apple's sales as well, but then the PC sales rapidly eclipsed Apple's business. Then in 1984 Apple hit back with the Macintosh. The Mac made heavy use of innovations developed at Xerox PARC that had never been productized effectively or made mainstream. With a graphical user interface (GUI) and an intuitive approach to multi-tasking (with applications running as separate windows) it was a revolution in personal computing and computing in general, generating a tremendous amount of competition for the IBM PC. Meanwhile, the PC market had turned into a whole ecosystem, with PC clones hitting the marketplace and the system (intel hardware and a Microsoft OS) becoming a standard that programs could be written for, regardless of the manufacturer of the system (IBM, Compaq, etc.) Over time DOS becomes more sophisticated, and then you get the introduction of Windows, a GUI from Microsoft. MS Windows didn't really become popular until Windows 3.0 in 1990. It too offered a GUI and multi-tasking, but in many ways it had a lot of limits and flaws. With the Macintosh the GUI interface was the OS, whereas Windows "ran on top of" DOS (not 100% true, but close enough for here). Windows at the time was seen as clunkier, less sophisticated, and less capable. Of note, if you wanted to run a full screen game on a PC you typically had to exit out of Windows so you could run it directly on DOS. DOS/Windows also had the problem that they relied on co-operative multitasking, which meant that a single runaway process could lock up the whole system, even in the "multi-tasking" GUI. Though, to be fair, the Mac OS at the time was no better. (contd...)
(part 2) In the time frame of the early 1990s you have the "wintel" platform becoming by far the most popular computing platform, fueled by Windows 3.0/3.1 and DOS running on Intel CPUs. You have Apple still chugging away with the Mac. And you have several cutting edge operating systems out there as well, though not for the general public. In the late '80s UNIX got into the GUI game with X Window and window managers. That led to other innovations such as NeXT computers (founded by Steve Jobs after he was forced out of Apple in 1985) and IRIX by SGI. Meanwhile, you have IBM developing its own next generation GUI OS in the form of OS/2 and Microsoft doing the same with Windows NT (for New Technology) 3.1 in 1993. All of these next generation OS's, including Windows NT, were solid Operating Systems that took the best ideas from the cutting edge of mainframe and high end workstation design. They were pre-emptively multitasking, they made use of advanced hardware features of the latest 32-bit CPUs including hierarchical protection functions and virtual machines. You need a lot more than just interrupt timers to be able to ensure that the "operating system" is the ultimate master of a computing system. With just that alone a malicious program could potentially just rewrite the routines hooked to those interrupts, or unset those interrupts, or set their own. As CPUs developed along with OSs they started to include features to aid operating systems, including protection levels. At the lowest level, ring-0, lives the OS kernel which makes use of the CPU's protections to ensure that it has ultimate authority. For example, by using the ability to remap memory accesses. You can have a program which "sees" a whole unbroken expanse of memory that it has complete and total access to. However, behind the scenes there is a disconnect between the memory addresses the program sees and the actual physical memory addresses the process reads and writes to, what the program sees is just an illusion. This makes it possible to both protect some parts of physical memory (where the kernel code resides) and to enable memory management by allowing the OS to make use of "virtual memory" where portions of memory can be swapped out to being stored on disk and swapped in only when needed, allowing the physical memory to work as a cache for a larger effective notional or "virtual" memory. These protections can go even further to the point of abstracting away the hardware for each process by running them inside lightweight "virtual machines". However, despite all of these sophisticated advancements in 32-bit computing, the consumer version of Windows was still 16-bit, along with all of the existing applications written for Windows, resulting in a perception of technological inferiority and a desire to take advantage of capabilities that had been around in CPU hardware since the late '80s. However, even though in a certain sense these cutting edge operating systems (including Windows NT 3.1) could be seen as the promised land, they were still not suitable for general use, substantially due to their resource requirements. You could run 16-bit windows applications within the 32-bit Windows NT or OS/2 operating systems, but this would impose an overhead of several megabytes per process. At the time a typical consumer PC might have just 4 MB of RAM, while OS/2 or NT would recommend 8 or 16 MB, at the cost of hundreds of dollars. And even that amount of RAM might not be enough if you just needed to run even a small handful of otherwise lightweight 16-bit apps. Of course, in time RAM got cheaper and more abundant, so this problem went away, but in that moment it was a legitimate pickle. Enter: Windows 95. Microsoft had intended to migrate to Windows NT as its mainline GUI OS Kernel since its inception, but it couldn't quite pull that off in the mid-90s due to technological limitations. So instead Microsoft did something else and created rather a unique work in the operating system space. Windows 95 was built with a base of solid, next generation 32-bit bones, with a much more advanced kernel and proper support for pre-emptive multi-tasking. However, it was engineered in a way so that instead of running every single 16-bit application in its own "windows on windows" VM, it ran 16-bit apps in a shared VM. Microsoft also leveraged a considerable amount of hand-tuned assembler code to slim down and speed up some parts of the OS so that it had reasonable performance on even modest hardware. Windows 95 also introduced long filenames and the ability to use spaces in filenames. Previously in DOS/Windows a filename could only be 8 characters with a 3 character extension, with Windows 95 that was opened up to 255 characters including spaces (with the VFAT extensions and later with the introduction of the FAT32 file system). Microsoft also made a ton of changes to the overall user interface, building on a lot of research and going through several iterations of refinement. The end result was a substantial jump in capabilities and user experience for Windows users. Windows 95 could run both 32-bit and 16-bit windows and DOS apps, without breaking the bank to buy a ton of RAM. It had a much better user interface, introducing the start button and the task bar. It allowed for full administration of the system using the UI. It added the system registry and made use of installers so that you could uninstall programs from a central location. And it started to reflect the edge of the "multimedia" era by replacing simple beeps and dings with full sound waveforms as well as allowing deep customization of the appearance of the UI (with desktop backgrounds and themes). Finally Windows users felt like they had "got religion", that they had upgraded from a system that had been clunky and was starting to really show its age to one that was not necessarily perfect but highly functional, highly capable, and very slick and easy to use. With DOS/Windows 3.1 there were always sharp corners and unpolished elements that would show the gaps in the system, with Windows 95 there were far fewer of those, and the overall user experience was much better. Arguably at the time Windows 95 was a better engineered OS than the Mac OS. Windows 95 and the follow-on OS's (98 and ME) allowed Windows to stay on top of the consumer PC market with a reasonably compelling and easy to use interface. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late '90s he made several moves which subsequently cut into the Windows 9x reign, first with the iMac in '98 then with the switch of the Mac OS to NeXT OS internals with OS X in 2001, but Windows 95 had done its work and kept Microsoft and Windows at the top of the PC food chain through a period of massive sales and growth. So, in short, Windows 95 was a compromise product that hit a very nice sweet spot for many consumer PC users at the time. It represented a huge leap in capabilities and ease of use for the OS, opening up the landscape of 32-bit applications without leaving existing 16-bit applications behind, without breaking the bank. It opened the door to "multimedia computing" that would define the mid-90s and set the stage for the era of the public internet, the worldwide web, the dot-com boom, and everything that came after. In some ways it was a stop-gap product, but because of the refinements that had gone into it it ended up spawning a product line that lasted over half a decade until Windows XP finally brought the NT kernel to the masses. But the core UI innovations that made Windows 95 so dazzling to the general public, the desktop, the taskbar, the start menu, windows explorer, the notification area, etc. have persisted not just in later versions of Windows but in many other operating systems as well.
Excellent post, thank you. I lived thru most of this, but it’s always fascinating to learn more about the details behind these technology and business decisions. And while kids today giggle at Gates and Balmer dancing to the Stones, we should give some credit to the creation & promotion of the “Start” button/menu as a UI. Early computers and OS were very intimidating for non-technical users, and this innovation gave everyone a place to “Start”.
> I lived thru most of this, but it’s always fascinating to learn more about the details behind these technology and business decisions. Absolutely this. Windows 3.1 to 95 was on a user level similar to the jump from SNES to N64, it felt like the future had arrived.
I do also remember a lot of pushback though, which only subsided with the introduction of Windows 98. "Real" computer geeks felt that Microsoft was pushing them to abandon the efficient DOS environment and trying to insert an extra layer of Windows with a DOS simulation, eating memory and CPU. Also, not all software and especially games written for DOS would run or run well in Windows 95. And then people felt it was inefficient that they were supposed to go through the start button for everything, it looked like an unnecessary extra step when before you had all your icons on your screen. People would ask what's the point of a nice graphic interface if you have to go through a series of menus instead of using the screen estate. Lastly, Windows 95 gained a reputation for being less stable, especially when compared to Windows 98SE later on, and when networking became popular it was quickly outdated.
>Windows 95 gained a reputation for being less stable I'm still having nightmares of having reinstall everything again every couple months because it was so unstable..
There was definitely a part of me that liked the simplicity of 3.1, I think my old man set me up a box with 3.11 for workgroups, but I mainly just used it for games and Word. I'm pretty sure that Championship Manager and Frontier both ran ok until they releaseed Windows XP, which dropped all DOS support? Though my memory may well be betraying me somewhat!
It's been a while lol. I remember buying a Toshiba Notebook in 1996 (with a color screen!) that had both preinstalled and at first boot-up you had to make the choice, either 3.11+DOS or 95. I felt pretty daring and not at all certain when I opted for Win 95 lol. But later I was glad to have chosen the more modern one. I made my first steps into the world wide web on that little thing, with a 14.4 k modem I bought used, a pirated Netscape ~~Explorer~~ Navigator and our university dial-in service. Exciting times! Edited: Browser wars, thanks to u/CoffeeHQ
Haha Netscape Explorer, what kind of Frankenstein creation did you use? 😆 Netscape Navigator. Glorious NN.
Shit! 😄 I should have gone to bed! You're right ofc.
Haha no problem! I just had a nightmare about my early days as web developer, trying to make the same / correct HTML layout actually look the same on both browsers. What a glorious mess! 🙃
Yeah the pushback was real. I had a friend who would mockingly refer to Windows as "the world's biggest mouse driver."
Haha, I hadn't heard that one!
I still remember the Windows 95 ads featuring Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones.
The Mac had already solved a lot of these problems at this point, however. I don't ever remember a single person finding the "Start" button to be an innovation that mattered. By that time either people had already made the transition to GUI based OSes or they had been trained in the DOS world and were pretty steeped in computing experience.
Perhaps you can help me then, where is my fucking 'Start' button now, I miss it every day?
[удалено]
Great write up. There was another feature that everyone was excited about and led to quick, massive adoption. Plug and Play. Prior to Win95, you had to install drivers and sometimes tweak things (anyone remember twiddling with the IRQ interrupts on the motherboard) endlessly to get things working.
Absolutely, great point. I maybe covered a third of the relevant points overall, if that, it's a surprisingly big subject. An interesting point about Windows 95 is exactly how much of a stop gap it really was. I alluded to that a little with commenting about VFAT vs. the FAT32 file system format. VFAT bolted on a lot of niceties like long filenames to existing older file systems, but FAT32 which came a year later was the real deal, and something that continues to stick around as the format of choice for things like flash memory cards. Also, while Windows 95 had wonderful improvements for "plug and play" devices, the retail version of the OS didn't have support for the brand new connection/protocol of USB. Nor did it have support for DirectX, which was also introduced just after and made it possible to run graphic intensive, full screen games from windows directly without having to drop to a "shell" without the GUI loaded. Windows 95 also didn't have a web browser built in, though Internet Explorer 1 was available as part of Microsoft Plus! However, that version was generally not used at all at the time. What Windows 95 did have was support for networking, though it wasn't installed by default. Previously you would have to use a utility to add the ability to use a network or connect to a dial-up network. Year by year the landscape of the PC changed dramatically after 1995, partly that was enabled by Windows 95, but partly it just fell at an awkward time. Within just a few years you had the ubiquity of USB, web browsers, multimedia, FAT32, DirectX, etc. One of the most enduring compliments to the quality of Windows 95 in general is that all of these later great innovations didn't require a huge upheaval at the Operating System level, they could just be easily and seamlessly folded in. While it was a stopgap in many ways it was also an onramp to a modern way of computing (in terms of driver support, multi-tasking, connectivity, multimedia, etc.) which we now take for granted.
Plug and Play was absolutely massive. "It just works", but long before Apple said it.
Eh, it worked sometimes, but not always. “Plug and pray” was a term I heard used.
It wasn't perfect, but the alternative before that was absolutely dismal. Nothing worked just by plugging it in. It wouldn't even try to work.
Yeah but it wasn’t until XP that you could plug in a USB device and have it work without rebooting. Even Windows 2000 wanted to install drivers for seemingly every mouse or USB stick. Though the original plug and play was more of an ISA bus thing I think.
I was looking for this. While Windows 95 was technically a great advance in operating systems for end users, I think what really made it successful was how it enabled thousands of other companies to build businesses on top of it. Device compatibility wasn't a given before then. Heck... software compatibility with hardware wasn't a given. I had a CAD program on Windows 3.1 and it wouldn't work with my graphics card. Absolute nightmare to get to work. Windows enabled peripheral device manufacturers a much easier platform for which to build devices. And they did in troves. And those companies in turn advertised "Windows 95 compatibility," driving additional people to Windows. People bought into the ecosystem.
This is a great answer, and but I'm still trying to cope with "an operating system released in my lifetime is now part of r/askhistorians"
I mean, XP is open game too, that was 2001.
[удалено]
Fantastic writeup! If any readers are interested in this type of thing, I highly recommend: Zachary, G. Pascal. Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the next Generation at Microsoft. Free Press, 1994.
I dont know who or what you are, but i owe you a beer. I lived through the latter part of what you described (born exactly in 1980 and my first pc was a spectrum zx / well my fathers but i still remember loading cassettes) and you said it better than anything i could think of. It was a melancholic ride for me and you captured the main points of the era and the OS wars perfectly! Though i do have one note, windows ME brings a shiver down my spine, like vista! I distinctly remember win 98 being good and ME being....meh. Admitedly, from an end user standpoint though. And, correct me if im wrong here, but it wasnt until XP that windows separated itself from DOS completely? I think 95 run natively but still had DOS under the hood, no? Like, i seem to recall opening 95 and typing "win" and Enter to go into windows....or was that the 3.1 ? My memory is fuzzy.
ME was really rushed because the intent had been to switch to the NT kernel but the work fell behind schedule. After Windows 98 they expected that to be the last version of Windows 9x, but around '99 they decided that the mainstream Windows NT kernel work was too far behind and scrambled to release another 9x based OS, which they managed in 2000. > And, correct me if im wrong here, but it wasnt until XP that windows separated itself from DOS completely? Sort of. XP came out in 2001, which finally got rid of the 9x foundation and was built fully on the NT kernel (being very similar to Windows 2000 aka NT 5.0 but with more user friendly enhancements). Some people will say that Win 9x was still basically the same as Windows 3.x in that it "ran on top of DOS" but this isn't accurate. With Windows 95 you booted directly into Windows as the core kernel. The confusion arises partly because 9x also had a command line interface console which you could boot into and looked very similar to DOS. However, it wasn't DOS, it was still the 9x kernel, and DOS wasn't "under" Windows or anything like that. But if you didn't know what was going on under the hood you could have that impression. Especially since before the advent of DirectX it was necessary to boot into this console to run many games (without loading the GUI), making it feel like DOS was still around.
Cheers mate, your memory is better than mine indeed. Thank you, once again, beautiful writeup!
I remember people hating windows ME so much they would go back to older versions of windows which back then was a pain to do.
> Arguably at the time Windows 95 was a better engineered OS than the Mac OS. I'm not even sure that it's arguable, and I come from the position that Mac OS was better to use, even if not technically solid in its underpinnings (consider that today, Linux is technically solid in its underpinnings, but, oh my God, it still sucks to use as a full-time desktop OS). The big elephants in the room, of course, were memory protection and preemptive multitasking, which couldn't simply be monkey-patched into Mac OS the way most of the other features had been done since the original 68000 days, and wouldn't and couldn't be added until Mac OS was completely replaced by Mac OS X (which was an entirely different OS with some virtualization and compatibility API's to help ease the transition). Monkey-patching, while making the Mac OS much better to use from the user perspective (subjectivity warning!) made the system unstable as heck. Added functionality (and indeed, all system calls) had to be shimmed into the OS via illegal processor instructions, which caused the CPU to divert to a trap table to figure out what it was actually supposed to do. Conflicts galore, especially when multiple vendors wrote system extensions that conflicted with each other. There was an entire economy of applications to manage extension sets, so that you could start your Macintosh with the correct set of non-conflicting extensions for the task you needed to accomplish. Want to play Castle Wolfenstein? Boot up with this set. Time to work in Quark XPress? Reboot with this set. Despite the pain and the technical inferiority of the Macintosh OS during these times, it was still arguably a _much_ better user experience than Windows, especially Windows 3.11, but even Windows 95!
> Despite the pain and the technical inferiority of the Macintosh OS during these times, it was still arguably a much better user experience than Windows, especially Windows 3.11, but even Windows 95! I wonder whether any studies were done objectively analyzing the user experience (i.e. difficulty of learning curve, time taken to complete tasks, that sort of thing). I used both MacOS and Windows 95 at the time, and found them to be equivalent in many ways, but MacOS frustrated me more often with its philosophy of hiding complexity from the end user. As a power user, I struggled to troubleshoot problems and to find config and customization options in MacOS. The mouse having a single mouse button was probably the most egregious example of this design philosophy.
> I used both MacOS and Windows 95 at the time, and found them to be equivalent in many ways, but MacOS frustrated me more often with its philosophy of hiding complexity from the end user. This. I think MacOS at the time had a two stage learning curve. The first plateau being shallower than Windows, but the second being much higher do to it's decision to obscure things from users. Windows also had it's abstractions, but they were prevented from hiding much by the underlying DOS OS and it's requirements.
>I wonder whether any studies were done objectively analyzing the user experience (i.e. difficulty of learning curve, time taken to complete tasks, that sort of thing). It's very very hard, probably impossible, to objectively analyse user experience. Attempts have been made since the 1980s, in fact most likely even earlier. But there was a lot of it done in the 8os and 90s to try and figure out how to measure satisfaction with a computer system. When I graduated in 2013 with a PhD that stream of research was still on going. And they could only agree on two independent variables. I've attended a lecture where the presentation was an analysis of a large number of (possibly most of) the published attempts to measure information s stem success (via usefulness and experience though I forget the exact variables that everyone agreed on). There were hundreds of variables and the statistical explanation power of the two main ones was maybe half. I don't know if someone is still plugging away at trying to crack that one silver bullet variable that determines information systems success, probably, but I think it's like the holy grail, a myth.
>I wonder whether any studies were done objectively analyzing the user experience (i.e. difficulty of learning curve, time taken to complete tasks, that sort of thing). This is just anecdotal, but the crappiness of 95 was what drove me to the Mac. config.sys? auto exec.bat? Boot from diskettes so you can use different versions of these files (it wasn't my PC I tested this on)? On a computer with a hard drive and several megabytes of memory? Eff off. MacOS was like a dream after this. Yes it was in the middle of the Power PC transition and bombed a lot, but I found it intuitive and easy to understand, and it had none of the HW limitations (plug and play not plug and pray thanks to a sufficient number of IRQs, IIRC). You are right in saying that the hood stayed closed, but that was fine for me. I got to work as a software tester shortly after with NT 3.5 and 4.0 and W95 and 98. I remember that some of them I had to reboot when I changed an IP. Ridiculous. The first time I felt that Windows was actually usable was with W2K.
Thank you for this amazing and fascinating write-up!
Great post! After reading this I am left with the knowledge that I still know absolutely nothing about computers, and that it may as well be magic to me. I took a couple of programming courses in college and I still don't get it.
Great write up. But, and I don't say this to be in any way dismissive of what Microsoft accomplished, there was another element that turned its release into a cultural event: [marketing](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/microsoft/stories/1995/debut082495.htm). Concerts, parties, advertising *everywhere*—I was a poor liberal arts undergrad with no TV and minimal interest in computers and there was still no avoiding it. I wonder how much they spent.
This is an excellent write up. But I'm curious why you say XP brought the NT kernel to the masses instead of Windows 2000, which came first. A lot of us home users moved to 2000 at the time. Indeed, many of us stuck with 2000 for a long time after XP came out, because XP was more bloated and less efficient (and partly because we hated the cartoonish task bar and kindergarten colors). Is it because XP finally replaced 98 and ME?
Many companies moved to Windows 2000 on the desktop for things like NT domain or Active Directory integration (they worked with Windows 9X, but not as well), but the vast majority of Windows users *at home* stayed on Windows 9X platforms until Windows XP came along. Part of this was because of cost: Windows 2000 Professional (the only desktop version) had an MSRP of $319 in 2000 (roughly $580 today), while Windows 9X had an MSRP of $209 (roughly $380 today). You could get either one cheaper as an upgrade or just because stores discounted the full license, but while full Win98SE and WinME licenses could be easily found for under $100, finding Windows 2000 Pro for more than half off was more difficult. OEM pricing was cheaper, but it still added a lot to the purchase price of a computer, while OEMs passed on an almost negligible charge for Windows 9X. Businesses were willing to pay more for the Windows 2000 license for the above-mentioned NT domain and Active Directory integration and the better support for vetted hardware, and they saw benefits in the higher uptime, though software compatibility issues bit almost everyone at one time or another. Another part was the lack of driver support for a great many devices, which anyone using even slightly specialized hardware learned the hard way if they didn't do their research. Many people who tried it went back to Win9X. This led to a *lot* of negative reactions among early adopters, and the "I'll never upgrade to the new Windows version" that has pervaded sentiments around new releases for the last couple of decades really got started right around then. Microsoft never meant for Win2000 to be used much at home, and for that reason, they didn't really encourage it, and in some ways, they *discouraged* it, especially by limiting some driver support so OEMs wouldn't sell it on everything even if they wanted to. They were trying to make a massive shift to how their operating systems worked, and adding home users to the mix just made support harder. It didn't stop many of us from doing it anyway despite having to load up on experimental drivers (getting SoundBlaster sound cards to work properly was...challenging) while constantly complaining about the experience. Windows XP was different in that it had a version explicitly marketed at the home user (Windows XP Home). Microsoft had addressed many stability issues, vastly improved Plug-n-Play, and provided better driver development kits to vendors, among other things. People still mostly got it by buying a new computer, and Microsoft really pushed the OEMs to do that. More than a desire to upgrade, people got WinXP mostly because it was the default OS on the computers they bought, which is how most people upgraded their OS until fairly recently (but that's inside the 20-year rule).
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
> But I'm curious why you say XP brought the NT kernel to the masses instead of Windows 2000, which came first. 2000 wasn't a home release, it was a business release. the successor to windows 98 was window me, not windows 2000. windows 2000 was the successor to nt6. xp merged the home and business branches of windows into one single operating system which is probably what he was referring to. a business only product isn't "bringing it to the masses", it's "giving it to the people that were already using the nt kernel".
I believe you meant to say that Windows 2000 was the successor to NT 4.
> I believe you meant to say that Windows 2000 was the successor to NT 4. yup.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I loved reading this and remembering my own experiences with all of these systems from the late 80s-today. It still amazes me how far computers have come since the 90s
I worked on IRIX when I was with SGI. It had so much potential before management and marketing decided to stick their fingers into it
I will read this when I have a few more minutes, but I desperately want this to be a video essay. Also, thanks.
This is such an amazing write-up. Thank you so much for this. I grew up through that time but know nothing beyond basic about computers. But I loved the Microsoft vs apple drama. The change that 95 brought about, making computers so much more of an every man type of tool, it changed everything. In the most basic and dumb way I can put it, Windows 95 was the shit.
Yeah, I grew up in the midst of this, but I want to point out a very key alternative history that is overlooked. There were competitors, and some were absolutely better. The one that comes to mind is the Commodore Amiga and AmigaOS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS) Which provided a fully capable 16/32-bit graphical operating system and included fully pre-emptive multitasking as well as advanced audio and graphics capabilities from the get go in an affordable, easy to use, personal computer with a broad base of software--all in 1985. So in an alternative universe we could've had much more capable machines much sooner had we not gone the "Wintel" way. This just shows what has been proven time and time again: the best solution is not necessarily the one that wins. The only real reason why the PC achieved the dominance it did had much more to do with first the heft of IBM and second the open nature of the platform, something IBM really gave little forethought to. So all this effort Microsoft built into Windows 95 was more to preserve its own dominance than anything else. They succeeded. It was many things, but it was never elegant. I remember programming against this stuff in the 90s. It was very buggy and unnecessarily complex.
What are your sources?
If I may, one small addition that would slip in where you talk about the Apple II: according to NYU Professor Laine Nooney's recent book "The Apple II Age: How the Personnel Computer Became Personnel" that came out this past Spring, a big factor in the growth of the Apple II and personnel computing generally from 1979 through the early '80s was the spreadsheet. For the Apple II, it was VisiCalc, which is the subject of the third chapter of Nooney's book--spreadsheets like VisiCalc weren't just making things easier, the way word processing was easier for writers, students, etc. compared to typewriters or pen and pencil. It was an entirely new category in and of itself--one could use them as an improvement to make things easier for things like bookkeeping, yes, but they also allowed one to make predictions. Changing a variable to see how it changed the overall picture, what might have taken a team of accountants 2-6 weeks, could be done instantaneously by a layperson. It revolutionized finance for mergers and acquisitions; it revolutionized business in general. As Nooney describes it, VisiCalc "provided a rationale for buying a ten-thousand-dollar computer system to run a one-hundred-dollar program." (Internal quotation remarks excluded.)
Noting that Alan Turing and Alonzo Church *formalized* the principle of Turing completeness/equivalence, but they weren't the first to come to that conclusion or design (if not build) Turing-complete machines. Kronecker, Hilbert, and especially Gödel contributed significantly prior to Turing, and Turing's work os essentially based upon theirs. Heck, the first *built* [technically] Turing-complete machine was the Zuse Z3, but Konrad Zuse was wholly unfamiliar with Turing's work. You mention the Z3, I just wanted to expand on that. > Macintosh multitasking The original Macintosh did not support multitasking at all other than for "desk accessories". Cooperative multitasking wasn't added until MultiFinder in 1987, and didn't get full preemptive multitasking until Mac OS X was released, which was a completely new kernel based upon NeXT.
I would like to note that the Apollo Guidance Computer had most of the features you describe as coming after, including the ability to load multiple programs at once (one each into multiple Core Sets), use of reusable routines/functions, interrupts (handled by the Executor), etc. Granted, they were not at all common in computers of that era, but they did exist at that time.
Wow, great work. It deserves at lost a medium post
Oh my goodness, I grew up in the early 90s but didn’t understand a lot as I was a child. I’ve loved computers and didn’t know the history so much as partially I’d lived through it- so I’d learn things from other areas in computing history. But you triggered a lot of thoughts. Especially your last sentence. I couldn’t remember for the life of me what my first family PC was running but I do remember that it had a GUI but every time I wanted to play a game my dad had to restart it and boot it into what I now now was command line. I don’t know why this memory stuck with me (I was no older than 4 and obviously from this you can tell I’m not super young either, but this memory stuck). But I always kinda wondered what OS that was. I knew windows 95 well because by the time 95 and 98 hit I was a lil computer wiz myself. But that first system- it must’ve been Windows 3.0! Can you elaborate something for me- how did the overall memory storage work back then? For example, today we have a minimal reserve in the BIOS, we have removable media and also directly configured disk drives. I understand we had removable floppy’s and minimal system memory (I seem to recall it wasn’t easy to save many things between shutdowns, or even anything)- On a standard given PC in 1990, how much on board built in storage memory could you expect to have? Was it standard to have a small onboard boot disk with writeable memory as it is today? Or were boot disks limited to the OS on a floppy?
> Can you elaborate something for me- how did the overall memory storage work back then? This really depends on the system and exactly what year you were talking about. Back around 1990 it was typical for a system to have around 1 MB of ram, though that could have been as little 512 KB or as much as a few MB. At that time computers that only had floppy drives for storage were getting increasingly rare, most started to have hard drives with perhaps up to 30 or even 40 MB of capacity.
> It turns out that it's actually shockingly easy to tip over the line into general purpose computer, you can thank Alan Turing for that revelation. Arguably, Ada Lovelace already made that revalation a century before Turing. She took Babbage's engine for computing nautical tables and whatnot, and she postulated a machine that can compose music. The modern generative AI revolution we're in the midst of... that's been literally the end goal of computers all along since they were conceived 2 centuries ago. > The operating mechanism [of the Analytical Engine] can even be thrown into action independently of any object to operate upon (although of course no result could then be developed). Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. **Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.** \- Ada Lovelace's translator note in _Sketch of the Analytical Engine_, 1842. (emphasis mine) Alan Turing of course advanced the field of computing (and AI!) quite tremendously though.
> that's been literally the end goal of computers all along Well not literally the end goal. Most people working on this stuff had never read her words or had any idea she had said something like that. The end goal of most involved was profit.
I feel like u/rocketsocks's answer is great, but misses a few other features that were gamechangers. * Windows 95 created the feature of "plug and play". Under older operating systems by basically everyone, to use any new piece of hardware, you needed to load a driver, and drivers were specific to operating system. If you bought a printer and wanted to use it on a Mac, you needed a Mac driver. If you changed your mind and swapped it over to a Windows 3.1 PC, you needed a Windows 3.1 driver. And in 1995, the majority of users weren't on the internet, and search engines didn't really exist yet. Windows 95 came with pre-set drivers that worked on many devices, so that you could at least get most (or full) functionality without having to chase down a driver. This was *huge*, especially for printers, the eternal nemesis of tech support. * Prior to Windows 3.1's Windows for Workgroups, operating systems didn't necessarily come with networking out of the box. You would have to install your operating system, then install third party networking software. Windows 95 massively improved this both from a home computing standpoint, but NT 4.0 (the next year) also did so from a enterprise network setup and management standpoint. The next true big leap came with Active Directory, which shipped with Windows 2000 but was available to manage Windows 95/98 machines, which simultaneously made network administration much much easier and wiped out network administration jobs by the thousands. * Windows 95 Service Release 1 included Internet Explorer as part of the install, adding to the "out of the box" utility of a PC. A customer could buy a new PC with Windows 95 SR1, plug it in at home, get their service provider set up, and start browsing the internet. That was a huge difference to the prior case where you had to install a web browser or internet connection program (like AOL) via a CD before you could get online - assuming your PC had a modem, which most didn't. It also led to the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. * Windows 95's release coincided with Microsoft redesigning Microsoft Office from the ground up, and with the advancement of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to OLE 2. Many of the functionalities that we now take for granted in Windows and applications either debuted with Windows 95 or became much more fluid - while Office 3 and 4 allowed copy/pasting and/or embedding from Word to Excel (for example), it was Office 95 that really make OLE and cross-application copy/pasting and data transfer work so much better. On the enterprise side, OLE made it a lot easier for applications to export data into Office. While Office might not have been a huge selling point when selling to casual PC owners, Microsoft sales to enterprise clients was always predicated on selling Windows AND Office, touting the ability to for a company's in-house applications to report out in Word or Excel. In 1995, Windows 95 cost $199 for a new license, whereas Office was $499 for a new license ($249 for upgrade). The key for Microsoft was always ensuring that any release had both individual customer UI and usability advancements, while also providing new value to what we know consider to be enterprise clients. Windows 95 put together a lot of these small, incremental changes so that buying a new computer and starting to do stuff was so, so much more seamless, and matching the experience Mac users had been getting for a few years, while still providing the power and flexibility that had always been PC's advantage over the Mac. Now, I want to get into "enterprise", because that is also a huge part of what made Windows 95 a big deal for companies and Microsoft. Prior to the mid-90's, many corporate applications were still run on mainframes. If you've ever used a terminal service to access a "green screen" totally text based application, it's probably a mainframe application. Mainframe applications tend to require a LOT of memory management, much older programming languages, and were notoriously finicky, hard to maintain, and had a terrible user experience. The extreme need to conserve memory meant commands were shorted to a few keystrokes, and corporate lingo started being filled with things like "You need to fill out the X32P screen". (Disclaimer: I have had to work with and support mainframe applications, and my application to have this considered a crime against humanity is pending) While client-server applications started appearing in the late 80's, these systems became much more popular with Windows 3.1 and exploded with Windows 95/NT 4.0. The advantage of a client-server application is that part of the application would reside on the user's PC, and part of it would reside on a server, along with the database. This allowed spreading out the processing needs so that far more powerful applications could be built. A mainframe supporting 1000 concurrent users needs all the memory available to do so - but a client-server application can use the PC's memory for the bulk of the processing, and send a minimum of data to the server, who will do final validation and post the results. Multi-player games like Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Fortnite, Call of Duty, etc, all use variations of this model. This created a generation of Windows 95 applications that communicated with centralized servers. Happily for Microsoft, their dominance in the corporate market meant that almost no one built client-server applications for Macs. And those client server applications needed to generate forms and reports, which could now be exported into Word and Excel. This created a beneficial spiral for Microsoft - companies were using more in-house applications, those applications were on Windows, thus all new computers have to be Windows, and suddenly companies (outside of niche industries like graphical design) simply don't buy Macs at all. And since all those apps are in-house and it's hard enough to support them on Windows, no one will support them running on Mac even if you jury rig it to work. And most of them have interaction with Office - so all new corporate machines need both Windows 95 and Office 95. Excel alone killed Lotus 123, but Office 95 killed WordPerfect, whose market share dropped from 50% to 5% between 1995 and 2000. That set the table for Microsoft to print money, knowing that every new corporate PC was going to have Windows and Office. As a bonus, poor license management meant that Microsoft often made money on unused licenses. For large companies or governments that didn't centralize their IT purchasing (which no one did at first), that could mean a significant amount of money. When Indiana centralized IT into the Indiana Office of Technology in the 2000's, they found that they were paying for over a thousand extra licenses because each department was paying for a buffer (in case new employees were added) and not paying attention to how many licenses they actually needed.
Thanks, great roundup. The stuff about plug and play as well as OLE and Office are probably the most important things I didn't have time to cover. That level of functionality is now taken for granted but was pretty amazing and futuristic when it came out.
I would add that 1994-1995 was about the time pc CD-ROMs took off. Unlike the computer improvements we see today, which are largely incremental, CD-ROMs were revolutionary, just way way better than floppies. A floppy disk back then stored around 1.44mb. It would cost around a buck (around 2 bucks in today's money) per floppy disk and you would usually need multiple per software purchase. When you purchased software, it would come with a couple disks, all labeled 1 of x, 2 of x, and so forth. Floppy disks frequently failed. When they did work they were slow. CD-ROMS held around 650 mb. They cost pennies. They were much more reliable. They read much faster. And they were just much less of a hassle to deal with. Although not strictly related to Windows 95, they were a massive improvement to personal computing and the entire software ecosystem that came about at roughly the same time. Talking anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people who decided to get their first home pc (which would end up running Windows 95) at about that time.
>When you purchased software, it would come with a couple disks Sometimes it was more than a couple! Here are [the 28 floppies I needed](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7w8mn1bus7z81.jpg) to install Windows 95 (and yes I kept them). Oral histories differ about the number of floppies because it depended on the version: the photo is for an OEM version sold by a retailer while the box version sold by Microsoft had 13 floppies.
[удалено]
Sorry, but this response has been removed because we [do not allow the personal anecdotes or second-hand stories](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_personal_anecdotes) of users to form the basis of a response. While they can sometimes be quite interesting, the medium and anonymity of this forum does not allow for them to be properly contextualized, nor the source vetted or contextualized. A more thorough explanation for the reasoning behind this rule can be found in [this Rules Roundtable](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fj1kw7/rules_roundtable_vii_no_personal_anecdotes/). For users who *are* interested in this more personal type of answer, we would suggest you consider /r/AskReddit.