Happy 20th Birthday Windows 95

[Geoff]

Windows 95 was released on the 24th August 1995, how time flies. The average PC at the time had a 300mb HDD, 8mb of ram and a 15" CRT. You probably installed Win95 from the 13 floppy disks it came on unless you splashed out for a 'multimedia kit' for your PC and fitted a new fangled CD ROM drive and Sound card.

 

Windows 95 turns 20 | TechCentral

[unixman_again]

IMO, one of the three desktop verions of Windows that was acutally useful. 3.1, 95 and XP (with sp 2).

 

I had a really robust 95 install. I would arrive in the morning, switch the box on, go and make a cuppa and when I came back it had woken up and logged into everything. At the end of the day, I'd switch it off at the wall (no shutdown) and it never gave me any grief. The next place I worked also had 95 but I had to leave my PC on all the time. If I shut it down, chances are it wouldn't come back and needed a reinstall. I never did find out why.

[MrEprise]

We were quite lucky in that we'd only just purchased a new "Multimedia" PC in mid 1995 (of which came with an AMD Am486 DX4-100, 8MB RAM upgraded to 16MB a year later, 853MB WD Caviar HD, Soundcard, Quad-Speed CD-ROM & Windows 3.1) that when we decided to upgrade a year and a bit later, we only needed the CD version and could skip the pain of installing from floppies.

 

However, we'd ended up with a non-upgrade OEM copy which wouldn't install while Win 3.1 was in the way (curse you Time Computers who supplied the copy, though not sure they should have done). So I had to sit and work out which files I had to delete in the Windows directory before it'd let me install 95. It was lovely to use once we did figure it out and although I'd heard the rumours about how unstable it was - never did experience that myself.

[s_miller]

They grow up so fast!

 

I never had any problems with Windows 95. 98 either, although I remember it a bit of a blur. DOS, Win 3.1...

 

Life was so easy with a 512MB hard disk drive.

[unixman_again]

They grow up so fast!

 

I never had any problems with Windows 95. 98 either, although I remember it a bit of a blur. DOS, Win 3.1...

 

Life was so easy with a 512MB hard disk drive.

 

512MB - that's a big one! When the company that I worked for first installed XT's, they where 10MB drives and we were supporting three concurrent users. On the AT's with the ginormous 30MB drive, we could run 10 concurrent users. This was when the Pick Operating System ran natively. I wish I could remember the manufacturer of the serial port expansion cards we ran.

 

We were at a trade show once, showing off our package for builders. Back in the 1980s there was a lot of interest in controlling projects using activity networks and Gantt charts. On the stand next to us were a company showing off their DOS based package. On the standard 128KB PC they said they could handle 100 activities and if you had the super 640KB machine, 800 activities. They asked how many we could handle. I replied 25,000 and the look on their faces was priceless! Actually there is no theoretical limit. It didn't matter how much memory was in the box, our limit was based on the maximum file size the o/s could handle.