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