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