ElI5: Why was so special about Windows 95, what made it a 90s pop culture touchstone?
In: Technology
For people like myself, it was the first family computer in the home. Before that there wasn’t much of an option for us. We had Atari and Commodore computers in the past mostly for gaming. The previous version of windows on the PC wasn’t very user friendly and Macs were expensive. Getting that first PC with Windows 95 was like crossing over into an new era of doing homework, games, internet and information in front of a computer at home. People could explore this new way of life and reconsider education and career choices. The possibilities were new and endless.
Welcome to Microsoft Windows 95!
Windows 95 lets you unlock the potential of your PC.
–What you do now will be easier and faster.
–What you want to do, and more, is now possible.
–Whatever you do will be more fun.
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/installation/copying/win95-1-1.png
In 3.11, your PC potential was locked. What you did was hard and slow. What you wanted to do, and more was not possible. What you did was only mild fun.
it made computers available to the almost PC illiterate. Plug and Play wasnt a real thing before Win95.
Take games….in DOS when you installed a game you then had to pick all of the hardware your PC had to make it run (processor/video card/sound card). If your hardware wasnt in the preloaded choices its not like you could go on the internet and download them….the internet was still very basic. You were just shit out of luck, you would try every choice in the hopes it would work…W95 did most of that for you with the installation wizard.
i like the analogy of food, DOS was like being a farmer you could do it but it wasnt going to work for everyone. W95 was like a supermarket, while still not for 100% of people it went from 10-15% to 99%
Answer: The birth of an OS that was pleasant to look at. It was very customizable, and it made multimedia (a precursor of global availability of information and entertainment) in CD support widely available.
It had an impact that was similar to the iPhone 12 years later. It made just lurking around the OS a pleasant activity.
Games became less grainy, and the internet was just around the corner. Good times.
A lot of other answers have delved into technology; I actually worked on a Xerox Star workstation, an Apple Lisa, and the first Mac in Canada. So here’s a real short history for perspective:
Xerox developed the rudimentary Graphical User Interface (GUI) at their Palo Alto labs. They built this into a functional workstation, the Star, that allowed you to switch between programs, cut and paste, drag and drop, etc. This was revolutionary at the time of the DOS command line interface e.g. “C:> copy c:/windows/blah/*.exe d:/backup/executables/”. Many people said, correctly, this was the future of computing.
Xerox decided this wasn’t their core business, and let the work flounder. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs of Apple came by one day, and borrowed what he saw for the Lisa and Mac. The Lisa was a big, ungainly precursor of the eventual Mac, in part because of the size of components in the day. Where we now fit TB’s of data, a 10 MB HD was all they had, and it was quite large. RAM chips were 256k – that’s k, not Gb – so getting a megabyte of memory took a lot of space, and generated a lot of heat. However, the basic interface from the Lisa to the Mac to today’s iMacs continues.
Both Jobs and Bill Gates underestimated the demand for RAM. The original Mac was spec’d out at 512k; Gates is infamous for asking “Who would ever need more than 640k RAM?”. I remember cracking open my first Mac to upgrade it to 1 MB before I even ran a program on it. RAM’s important because it’s so fast to access. Today’s multi-tasking GUI’s need GB’s of memory to run well.
So everything has to be understood in this context of the size and cost of RAM. As RAM costs plummeted, people in the PC world kept adding more RAM to their hardware. However, DOS had this limitation that it couldn’t address more than 640k RAM, so a bunch of different solutions to this “high memory” (as in addresses higher than 640k) problem occurred. Having extra memory let people use more than one program at a time.
This created a *nightmare* for PC users. There were so many combinations of DOS versions, BIOS versions, display drivers, etc. that troubleshooting anything was a nightmare. But people wanted to use more than one program at a time, so Microsoft kept working on the issue. Windows 3.1 was their first attempt at a multi-tasking OS, and it was OK for the time, but clearly didn’t last.
All of this as a precursor to the question asked by OP. And the answer is, RAM costs had finally dropped to where the fairly high amount of RAM needed to support both a multi-tasking OS and a number of programs was affordable.
Win95, for all its flaws, was the answer to users’ demands for an OS that let them work the way people work today. It supported expanded memory in a standard way for all programs, so a lot of user issues disappeared. It was fairly easy to use, and it took a lot of fear away from people.
Finally, Win95 had a huge marketing campaign, including the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” as a theme, and in perhaps the most important answer to your question: the Win95 start-up chord soon became a ubiquitous signal “I just turned my computer on”. Maybe that’s what made it so important in pop culture!
One thing I’m not seeing anyone mention here is the way 95 freed everyone from the archaic 8.3 filename scheme. Back in the days of DOS files were named with 8 characters that could be anything followed by a period and a 3-character extension that told the OS what to do with the file. So Word for DOS would save files as “whatever.doc” and when you activated that file the OS would know to open Word. .exe was used for programs (executables), .bat was used for batch files, .xls for Excel files, .sys for system files, etc.
With Win95 the GUI allowed you to name any file anything with no character limit. When I demoed Win95 by creating a new file and renaming it “This is my file and I’ll call it whatever I want to.doc” I could watch the eyes bug out of most user’s heads. All of a sudden you were using plain English instead of arcane command line codes. That made the PCs a hell of a lot friendlier and more accessible.
Windows 3.1 was already easy to use. The problem was, not everyone had it, and it was expensive.
Windows 95 merged DOS and Windows into one big Operating system, where previously they had been two separate operating systems. Before this, as an application developer you had to target the largest customer base. That was DOS (you had to have DOS to be able to run windows, after all).
Windows 95 made Windows the default OS. So developers could write their new applications just for Windows. New computers would release with Windows 95, and these were the people buying new applications.
Honestly the primary difference was one that most users couldn’t see and never thought about.
*Multitasking* is when a computer runs multiple programs at the same time. This isn’t as simple as it seems, because there’s only one CPU (the reality is a bit more complicated now but it doesn’t matter for the explanation). So each program has to share time on the CPU. Nowadays we don’t even think about it, even our phones multitask with ease. But it wasn’t always that way.
Windows 95’s primary predecessor, Windows 3.1, used an older multitasking technology called *cooperative multitasking*. What it did was Windows would start the first program running. The first program would run for a while (usually just a fraction of a second), then tell Windows it was done. Then Windows would move on to the next program, and so on, until every program had its chance. Then it would circle back to the first program, and continue in a loop.
The problem with this form of multitasking is that Windows had to trust the programs to behave. If one program took too long, either because of an error or just being greedy, there wasn’t much Windows could do about it. It had to wait until the program called it back before it could move on.
Windows 95, on the other hand, used a new kind of multitasking called *preemptive multitasking*. In this version, Windows would give each program a limited time slot to run. The program could still pass control back to Windows, but if it didn’t, Windows would pause the program no matter what once its time ran out. This meant that even if one program was frozen or acting up, it wouldn’t affect the other programs or Windows itself.
For users, this meant two things: first, Windows felt more responsive. You could start or switch applications easily and they would feel fast. Second, it was more stable. If a program stopped working, you could just restart that program, and wouldn’t have to be worried about other programs or the whole system being affected. And since the promise of Windows was built on multitasking, this made Windows 95 feel like the first time it really lived up to its name.
You could suddenly have more than one program or folder open, which was not possible before. The PCs were also much faster. I had a 33 MHz PC with Win 3.11. I think the ones with Win95 at least had 100 MHz. Often more.
Late to the game, so people have already covered most of it… but there’s one thing I don’t see anyone mentioning. Although Windows 95 wasn’t very good/stable on release they worked on it a fair bit. After a while it got (for the time) rock solid for stability and performance.
Pretty often in the Windows 98 and later days the best solution to getting something working was to install Windows 95 instead. This meant that it had a strong following for gamers and computer geeks, and people mostly don’t remember the days when it was often worse than Windows 3.1.
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