30 Years Ago Windows 95 Changed Everything

I didn’t cover this back in August because it seems like 1995 was just a few years ago, but 2025 is the 30th anniversary of Windows 95, an important milestone in the history of graphical operating systems.

Back in 1995, the computer world was a vastly different place. Sure, Windows was on its way to becoming the dominant OS. But Mac OS was still loved. Atari was still around with their TOS/GEM OS, even though they were no longer really in the computer business by this point. Sadly Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 so the Amiga was withering on the vine.

In the PC world, OS/2 Warp was trying to give Windows a run for its money. 1995 is when I bought my first PC and although I had been using DOS and Windows for about a year at work, I didn’t much like Windows 3.1. It was ugly and its primary interface, Program Manager, was clunky.

Windows 3.1 Program Manager

So I decided to use OS/2 Warp on my PC (and eventually at work) because it could run both DOS and Windows 3.1 programs, often better than Windows itself, and things worked wonderfully, at least for a while.

But then Windows 95 came out and destroyed it.

OS/2 Warp running the Windows Program Manager in the corner

It’s hard to overstate what a phenomenon that Windows 95 was. Code-named Chicago, it was known to be coming for a long time as it had been public beta-tested for nearly a year leading up to its release. Once it was released, it seems like the PC magazines had articles about Windows 95 every month!

From DOS to Windows

But before we get to Windows 95, here’s a little background.

Macintosh introduced the graphical user interface (GUI) to personal computers and that torch was carried by the Atari ST and Amiga computers, it wasn’t until Windows 3.1 came out that the GUI became mainstream. Before that most people just used DOS.

DOS was just terrible. It was a simple OS and its interface was just a command line. You had to know and type your commands to do anything. And the programs that ran on DOS all had their own unique interfaces with arcane commands that you had to memorize (or attach templates to your keyboard). Without special utilities you couldn’t even run more thane program at a time! Mouse support was also minimal.

So compared to DOS, Windows 3.1 was better. But it was not really good, either. It crashed a lot, but to be fair most computers back then crashed often. However, it felt easier to crash Windows because you could do more with it.

Windows 3.1 was also built on top of DOS. The computer actually booted into DOS first and then you could type a command to start Windows. This could be automated, of course, but you usually still had to spend time fiddling with DOS CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to get things loading properly.

As I mentioned before, Windows 3.1 was also rather ugly and the Program Manager was clunky. Windows was a GUI but it didn’t really work much like the better designed Macintosh and even the lowly GEM In my Atari ST felt easier to use and looked nicer.

Windows 95 Takes Over the World

Windows 95 was introduced in August of 1995 and Microsoft went all out with its marketing. The hype of the betas from the past year really got people excited about Windows 95 and there were actually long lines to purchase it!

Yes, you had to purchase Windows 95. An upgrade was about $100 (about $210 in 2025) and the full version about $200 (about $420 in 2025).

To run Windows 95 you needed a PC with a minimum a 16Mhz 386DX CPU, 4MB of RAM and about 50MB of hard drive space, which were pretty reasonable specs for 1995 as by then the 486 was common and the Pentium was just starting out.

The name Windows 95 was also interesting. At the time, most software just used version numbers. Although using a year in a version is more common today (and in fact what Apple just did with iOS and macOS), it was not common in 1995. Windows 95 is the first time I can recall that being done.

I do find it funny that in 2025, we have Windows 11 (a version number) while Apple just switched to using iOS 26 and macOS 26 (a year).

Windows 95 introduced several important improvements that really helped its adoption.

Improved UI

I think the one that got people so excited was the new look and feel. Windows 95 actually looked nice.

The slick Windows 95 UI

I don’t know how to describe it, but everything just felt better and looked cleaner. The TaskBar at the bottom was a great innovation that persists to this day.

The Start button also continues to exist to this day, although it has taken on different forms throughout the years. I found it funny that Microsoft used The Rolling Stones’ song, Start Me Up to help promote Windows 95 and its new Start button. I felt like the Stones were ancient in 1995, so it’s hard to believe that they’re still around today!

Long Filenames

One thing people have probably long forgotten is that in the DOS and Windows 3.1 era, files names were all ridiculously short using the 8.3 pattern. You had eight characters for the name and three for the extension.

Macintosh and Amiga also had long filenames, but the Atari ST used a derivative of the DOS file system (GEMDOS) so it also used the 8.3 filename convention.

Windows 95 introduced long file names that were backwards compatible with older DOS systems. You can still sometimes run into this backwards compatibility when you see a file path that has the “~” in it, such as Microsoft.txt to MICROS~1.TXT.

This definitely helped the average person and it also allowed spaces in names for the first time, although for us old-time users it’s still not something we fully trust!

Internet Explorer

Windows 95 introduced Microsoft’s internet browser, Internet Explorer via an add-on pack. Previously you used a 3rd party browser which usually meant Netscape Navigator. With Internet Explorer integrated and cheaper internet access made available using services such as America Online, most people got their first taste of the Web using Windows 95.

Internet Explorer would eventually crush Netscape, cause Microsoft some antitrust problems and give web developers headaches into the 2000s.

32-bit Apps

To me, adding 32-bit app support was the most important feature. It’s also the thing that lead to the demise of OS/2 Warp.

With 32-bit support, Windows 95 was more stable and could more easily work with larger amounts of memory. This let Windows 95 run more programs at once.

Although Windows 3.1 could also run multiple programs at once, it used cooperative multitasking for Windows apps. With cooperative multitasking, each app has to cooperative with the OS to let other apps have a chance to run. This is also what the Macintosh used for multitasking. It can be fast, but it also can allow a single app to hog the system. Running multiple apps on Windows 3.1 was not always seamless.

Windows 95 introduced preemptive multitasking and that is much better. It requires more resources, but with this type of multitasking the OS itself controls the apps and tells them how much time they have to run, cutting them off when it wants. It sounds harsh, but it allows for a much more responsive and reliable system.

However, Windows 95 still used cooperative multitasking when running older 16-bit Windows apps.

This change in multitasking and the rapid adoption of Windows 95 led to developers quickly updating their Windows apps to be 32-bit. And that meant that OS/2 Warp lost one of its signature features: the ability to run Windows apps.

Although OS/2 Warp could run Windows apps, it could only run 16-bit Windows apps. Those were the only types of apps that mattered when Warp was introduced, but soon 16-bit apps disappeared, replaced with updated 32-bit versions, and so did Warp’s ability to run Windows apps. There were few native OS/2 GUI apps available and after Windows 95 was released things quickly took a bad turn for poor OS/2.

Wrap

Windows 95 was succeeded in 1998 with Windows 98 and then Windows Me in 2000.

I personally never used Windows 95 or its derivatives. Windows 95 was good, but although Microsoft tried to hide it, DOS was still buried in there.

I didn’t want to deal with that so instead I toughed it out with OS/2 Warp until the summer of 1996 when Windows NT 4.0 was released. This OS was the pro-level operative system that I wanted as a software developer, updated to use the slick Windows 95 UI style. I really liked Windows NT and its successor Windows 2000.

In 2001 Microsoft introduced Windows XP to merge its consumer OS line with its pro OS line and although people look back fondly at Windows XP today, that transition was quite chaotic back then.

Back to Windows 95, I think most people went nuts over it because they came to appreciate having a GUI, but also realized that Windows 3.1 kind of sucked. Windows 95 gave most people the feel of a Macintosh on their PC. It also almost killed Apple, but that is a separate story.

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