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- Hacker News
- It was amazing, I was doing my first year in software engineering at the time and it felt like the future, the multimedia was impressive.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
There was Windows NT and OS2/Warp too.
I didn't play a lot with the BSD variants.
It was truly a magical time for OS enthusiasts.
by juancn - I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior. I was wrong.by spogbiper
- Wasn't Windows NT based on OS/2, which ended up taking over all of Windows starting with 2000 & XP?by alberth
- > I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior
Power of advertising.
If you remember 1995, the advertising for Win95 was huge. Really really huge. Including adverts at sports stadiums, in fashion magazines and the like where nobody would have thought about advertising an operating system FFS! People were buying copies of Win95 who didn't even have a computer because they wanted to be 'part of it'.
By contrast, I only ever remember seeing an advert for OS/2 in a single computer magazine.
by GJim - Yeah IBM really fumbled OS/2 badly, it was rock solid compared to Windows but the only places I really saw it used were at the old "true blue" companies that bought absolutely everything from mainframes to desktops to printers from IBM.
Even their "totally cool way to run your computer" campaign for OS/2 Warp pretty much fell flat. That was the last gasp, never heard about OS/2 after that.
by SoftTalker - If you have 90 minutes with nothing else to do I highly recommend giving the launch event with Jay Leno a watch.. it's really something unique. https://youtu.be/_JzfROUDsK0by unleaded
- Not to mention the Windows 95 Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry... thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ypXfodOu-sby 1stranger
- This might just be because it's a demo, but man are things ever fast... they open up a document and it just instantly comes up. They load a video and bam, instant. There's a little segment where Bill Gates is showing off opening up multiple instances of Excel and they open up so quickly. I tried opening up Excel on my desktop PC and the speed is nowhere close to what this video is showing. I open up a document nowadays and there's a splash screen, there's some lag as the application checks if there's an update, the application appears and the layout starts to jitter and flicker... none of that is in this demo.
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
by Kranar - 12 years old when Windows 95 was installed on our 486 PC. Such a change from Windows 3.1
I do remember my dad jumping back to Windows 3.1 atleast once, likely for the reason of performance/memory issues at the time with Win95 - but he did go back to it. Overall, it was a big step.
A couple of years later, likely to run Quake better that in did on our 486, he built his own PC. Pentium 133. I couldn't remember what RAM and HD space it had. Maybe 32MB RAM with 200GB disk or something. I am just guessing.
Regardless, running Windows 95 on it was night and day. High resolutions and smooth experience! It likely crashed a lot but when you had nothing really to compare it to, it is annoyances that were not that big of a deal back then. You just accepted it.
Of course, playing Quake on it was an absolute dream. A year or so later - we then had 3dfx cards. Good times!
Moving to Windows 98 just didn't seem like a big step to me. Windows 98 looked exactly the same as 95 except the desktop was riddled with icons to the internet. I hated it. Eventually you moved over it. Looking back, Win98 was likely a heavily improved Win95 and didn't crash as often. Again, these are things forgotten in time.
How times changed. I also had Windows 2000 at University and then moved to Windows XP. I had to keep reinstalling WinXP every 6 months as my mouse cursor would start to move downwards on its own. As much as I liked XP (eventually) it was the starting point of moving over to Linux.
My experience with Vista was not great. Again, from memory felt very bloated. Windows 7 was good. Never used Windows 8. Windows 10 was good. As for Windows 11... its simply mixed with pros and cons.
by masfoobar - Kind of insane to think about how in the span of 30 years we went from Win95 / DOOM-style games to UE5 and effective (to some degree) large language models. In a year-over-year view not much changes, but decade-over-decade is quite a different story.
When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.
by Insanity - Original Win95 did not even install a TCP/IP stack by default. It was an optional extra on the CD-ROM.
This changed with OSR2 I believe, when they started bundling IE4.
by skobes - I don't think MP3s were a widespread thing in August 1995.
That makes me wonder what the first pirated song was that was ripped to MP3 and provided for download over the Internet...
by netsharc - Not impressive at all. Think about the span of 30 years until Win95!
In 1965 we didn't even have CPUs. Transistors and ICs were at their very beginning. "Network" meant a teleprinter.
by M95D - > In a year-over-year view not much changes, but decade-over-decade is quite a different story.
I think this is the completely wrong takeaway. You are lumping in two very different 15 year periods into your 30 year view and giving undue weight to the latter half. Year-over-year in the 90s everything was changing. Decade over decade, 2013 to 2023 was basically unchanged. Move forward a bit, 2016 to 2026 and the only interesting computing development has been LLMs. They're neat, but 1995 to 2005 was way, way more interesting.
- I was living in Seattle that summer, and Apple had plastered the city buses with big ads that week, and they simply stated,
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
The article left out the triumphant arrival of long filenames.
That summer also marked the end of all my attempts to get friends and coworkers to switch to OS/2... although my linux experiments were ramping up at about the same time. Heady days!
by billygoat - That's funny. Somehow it completely escaped my notice.
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
by rconti - ^that's "CONGRATULATIONS w95" ... didn't see it at first ;)
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
- Shouldn't we rather celebrate the GA of Windows NT4 Workstation on August 24, 1996? It was 30 years ago and an amazing OS that at least for some tasks made me switch back from SuSe Linux.
- Both are worthy of celebrating IMO. I had a coworker back then who got the NT Server tribal logo pattern tattooed on his arm.
- Id say: both.
But yes, Win NT was the real game changer in Windows universe back then; if they hadnt made the switch, we would still have a tuned Win98/ME without proper multiuser account tenanting etc.
- "They could multitask, but it wasn’t modern pre-emptive multitasking. Instead, the applications cooperated rather than the operating system being able to hand out resources. This meant a poorly behaved program could do a lot more to gum up the works in 1994 than it can do today, since the operating system just had to trust all of the programs to cooperate fairly."
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The importance of this should not be understated.
Under Windows 3.1, or MacOS, programs could be written to periodically hand control back to the OS, allowing the OS to then hand-off control to another program, thus allowing cooperative multi-tasking. However, every single program involved had to be written to do this. If you ran a program that was older or not written for multi-tasking, it'd assume complete control of your machine until it terminated. Even multi-tasking friendly programs would hang your machine if they went into an infinite loop. There was no hope of appeal to the almighty task manager! The result was Windows (and MacOS prior to OS X) were simply not very good at multi-tasking, so users mostly didn't do it.
Preemptive multi-tasking allowed the OS to forcibly take back control from programs. Programs would be given slices of CPU time and didn't have to worry about handing control back, because the OS would simply take it back. If a program went into an infinite loop, it would continue getting slices of the CPU's attention, but so too would other programs and the OS itself. This meant you could Alt-Tab out of a word processor to look up something in your web browser without the risk of a browser crash bringing down your computer and causing you to lose everything you'd written since you last saved.
Windows 95 put an end (mostly) to the punishment of multi-tasking and changed how typical desktop users used their computers.
by beloch - "The box stated that it required a 386DX or better processor, 4 MB of more of RAM, and approximately 50 MB of disk space. Nothing stopped you from installing it on a 386SX. I know because I tried it, mostly out of morbid curiosity. It took forever to install. Booting took forever too. And once it managed to boot, it took forever to do anything.
But if you had a system that met the minimum stated requirements, the experience was still pretty terrible.
The minimum most of us recommended at the time for acceptable performance was a 486 faster than 33 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of disk space. And some will take issue with that today, because the experience on a machine like that still wasn’t very good. You had to draw the line somewhere, and then, as now, different people had different definitions of words like “minimum” and “acceptable.”
You really needed a Pentium-class machine to be happy with Win95, and I think Win95 did a lot to goose Pentium sales for Intel. If you could afford a 100 or 120 MHz Pentium with 16 or 32 MB of RAM and at least a 540 megabyte hard drive, you were much happier with it."
I had a Pentium 100MHz, and 8MB was acceptable, although I had a friend with 16MB and a 166MHz, and the grass always seemed greener. He was able to play Tomb Raider.
I make a lot of retro videos and tested a 386 on 4MB of RAM here: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#9-26-24-wi...
https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/z486/ https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about One can make Windows 95 solar powered again. The first time was at ISSCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juy8xP-hUtA
by initramfs - I had a 486 sx4 100 and was more or less okby spapas82
- My 10 year old brain was blown when I discovered the Buddy Holly music video on the Windows 95 CD. I just couldn't comprehend the idea of a music video being played on a computer. Felt like magic. Such different times.by scottious
- We're the same age then. I, too, was blown away.
I was soooo excited when my family bought a PC with 95 on it. My best friend, who had Windows 3.1, was so jealous.
by kilroy123 - And goodtime.avi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qcby netsharc
- 12 year old me didn't know who Weezer was, yet, but I knew Happy Days thanks to Nick at Nite. I was blown away, and my dad (who was the reason I knew Happy Days) thought I was crazy because he had no idea what it was. It didn't just feel like magic, it was magic. A whole music video right there on my Packard Bell.by eddieroger
- As a teenage nerd downloading and playing videos on his Pentium II with a 14" SVGA monitor this Onion article cracked me up https://theonion.com/new-5-000-multimedia-computer-system-do...by ingsoc79
- I remember being 15, that August. We were excited for this release. My dorky friends and I went to a local computer store and tried to get the clerk to show us what Windows 95 was like. He had a pre-release version installed on one of their computers. I don't even remember how we knew.
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
by ramijames - I tried a beta and was unimpressed. I tried to talk my dad out of buying it because it sucked... He went to the store and bought it with 4x4M EDO RAM DIMMs.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
by tosti