ElI5: Why was so special about Windows 95, what made it a 90s pop culture touchstone?
In: Technology
Honestly? They hired the cast of *Friends* to advertise it. Warp OS was more interesting, and compatible with a long list of established Microsoft products. Remember the time, this was before there was a computer and tablet at your reach. A lot of people didn’t know how to use a computer, and when they learned they learned DOS and UNIX, not exactly exciting stuff. Most people couldn’t afford a Mac. So here was a software that could help you use the PC to do tasks that were a huge pain before, like word processing, or relied on special business computers (i.e. an IBM running Lotus 1-2-3). Now you could run your spreadsheets at home, load up and Encarta disk at home and do your book report, and get your e-mail. It was just easy enough that parents who used terminals or IBM/DOS/UNIX at work could easily transition at home.
There was more going on, the ‘world wide web’ and the ‘information superhighway’ were on the news every night. They would run stories about how you can replace a whole conduit full of copper cabling with one fiber optic strand. Businesses started putting up websites so the tech saavy could find its address and phone number without digging through the yellow pages. Bill Gates / Microsoft greased the wheels of that phenomenon.
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