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  1970-01-01
  >It wasn’t truly a full 32-bit operating system, because there was still MS-DOS at the core if you dug deep enough.Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!
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  ramijames
  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.
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  initramfs
  "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
• beloch
  "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."-------------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 and end (mostly) to the punishment of multi-tasking and changed how typical desktop users used their computers.
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  scottious
  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.
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  throwaway_20357
  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.
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  unleaded
  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/_JzfROUDsK0
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  billygoat
  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.W95The 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!
• juancn
  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.
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  spogbiper
  I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior. I was wrong.
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  Insanity
  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.
• fraserphysics
  I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)
• phusion
  I was so excited to install this and finally be rid of Win 3.11. I was 13 or so when this came out and really just coming into my own with IT stuff, building PCs and whatnot. It was really mind blowing back then.
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  hilti
  I really do miss it, because it felt like a huge productivity jump and a logical organized UI and file system.When Windows Vista got released I switched over to Mac.
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  Georgelemental
  Four years minus one day after the first announcement of Linux
• vlowrian
  For anyone interested in a celebratory flashback: set your desktop background color to #008080 (https://desktopcolors.com/os/windows-95).
• rvba
  A random memory from that time is that we went to a computer shop with my cousin (she was much older than me) and there was a publicly available PC.She removed a plastic cover from the keyboard (does anyone remember those covers? They dont make them anymore due to cost cutting) and then... she wrote some magic and a demoscene demo popped up on the screen.Now I think it was MSDos so she opened Norton Commander and simply opened some demoscene demo. I wonder what was the name of that demo (or screensaver?)It was a bird view of 3d animated green-blue water.. made from some surfaces.For a kid who did know any english DOS was magic
• hn_submit
  Me and my colleagues had been downloading preview versions for months and it was such a revelation compared to 3.11. Except, it was (under the covers) still MS-DOS based.I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.
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  dekdrop
  Where can I get a copy orf Windows 95 nowadays?
• robotnikman
  I still have nostalgia for Window 95 and 98, they were the OS's I grew up with as a kid
• brcmthrowaway
  What was Apple doing at the time? Probably failing to ship Copland.Microsoft dominated the 90s like no other.
• snitzr
  I still remember some kid at school swearing that if the release date slipped into 1996 that Microsoft would get the US government to keep the calendar 1995.
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  hoten
  Why does the URL say 20th
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  phendrenad2
  There have been so many Desktop Environments over the years, but I still feel that Windows 95 perfected the desktop experience.Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
• jimt1234
  I remember feeling like I was becoming obsolete by Windows 95. I had built up a skillset getting Windows 3.1 configured properly and connected to this new thing called "the internet" (Trumpet Winsock!). Then Windows 95 came out with everything built-in - TCP/IP, browser, email, and most of all, plug-and-play.