ElI5: Why was so special about Windows 95, what made it a 90s pop culture touchstone?
In: Technology
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!
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