ElI5: Why was so special about Windows 95, what made it a 90s pop culture touchstone?
In: Technology
It was the beginning of making computers really easy to use, and the start of the “multimedia” age. To understand it, you have to know what computers were like before and how Microsoft evolved the experience from DOS to Windows.
## DOS
Before, there were a lot of different incompatible operating systems in use. We just say the word “DOS” today to refer to “Disk Operating System”, some people will say “MS-DOS”. But really DOS was an entire family of operating systems. The “DOS” part referred to some standards for how programs would be run within the OS, but not all companies made a DOS that was completely compatible with all other companies’ DOS. There was IBM DOS, Dr. DOS, MS-DOS, and probably more.
To install a program or play a game in those times, you had to do a lot of work. DOS had special files that told it how much memory your computer had and how to use it. Some programs or games might require you to reconfigure that file. The video and sound cards at the time had to also be configured through these files, and if you had a lot of devices you might have to do some work to figure out how to get them all working without accidentally trying to use the same resources. It was a mess.
## Windows 3
Windows 3.1 is famous, but didn’t really make this much easier. It was really just a GUI on top of DOS. That GUI made some of the configuration tasks easier, as it could display more elaborate screens describing what your choices were, but in the end installing new programs and hardware could still involve opening your case to reconfigure jumpers or editing an arcane file to assign memory in a different way.
## Multimedia
CD-ROM drives arrived around the period of time Windows 3.1 was really popular. At the time, having a hard drive with a few hundred megabytes was living large, so giving your computer a drive that could hold **650** megabytes really expanded the horizons. This opened the door to being able to play video or music on computers, so sound and video cards started being developed to handle this extra load.
Yes, before the early 90s it wasn’t very common to have sound cards OR video cards in PCs. They were still mostly business machines and businesses didn’t need those features. A lot of games just used the cruddy speaker designed to make beeps and boops when a program had an error for music. Early DOS games had notoriously bad graphics. If you wanted to play video games or support video you bought machines built for those tasks like the ones made by Amiga. At the time Apple was a gaming powerhouse because their machines were more focused on graphical performance than PCs running any flavor of DOS. But there were a lot of other computers on the market who were better at gaming than DOS, too.
## Windows 95
Win95 solved both of those problems at the same time. (Sort of.)
It was still built on top of DOS, but in this evolution you booted into the GUI first. MS tried really hard to make it so instead of YOU hand-editing cryptic configuration files, Win95 could automatically detect how your system was set up and use the right configuration. It introduced a sophisticated (at the time) technology called “plug and play” that let hardware like video cards describe themselves to Windows and be auto-configured. This made it much easier for the average person to own and operate a PC.
MS also had very strict policies that any PC sold with Win95 meet some minimum requirements. Win95 PCs were REQUIRED to ship with sound support, speakers, and a CD-ROM drive. MS wanted your first boot of a Win95 PC to include video and sound in ways only people with the most expensive DOS computers (or Amigas) had seen. My Win95 PC shipped with a free copy of Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia. My mind was blown when I could not just read an article about historical events, but watch videos and hear speeches! In a lot of ways, Wikipedia still pales compared to what I remember of Encarta.
There was effectively no competition on PCs. As far as I can tell, nobody who produced a version of DOS for the market had this idea or was trying to create it. Users could look at a Windows 95 PC and see vibrant colors, video, and hear it playing music. Next to it they’d see a DOS PC displaying text-based graphics and making occasional beeps and boops. Suddenly a PC wasn’t a thing you used for work when you *needed* to, but a device you could use for entertainment when you *wanted* to.
There was definitely competition on Apple and Amiga, but both companies were in trouble. One could argue their machines and their graphical OSes were superior to Windows 95, but they had been focusing on professionals who needed audio/visual performance and not consumers who wanted entertainment. Their OSes ran only on specific hardware, and due to their focus on professional markets that hardware was very expensive. Win95, on the other hand, could run on relatively cheap PCs that had been running DOS for the lower-end business market. Add a CD-ROM, sound card, and low-end video card and you had a capable Win95 machine for less than the competitors.
# TL;DR
Windows 95 made it easier to own and operate a PC. Microsoft required machines to support sound and video in order to run Windows 95. Nobody else selling an OS did both of those things on relatively cheap computers in the early 90s. That made for a very successful combination and the PC market exploded.
Latest Answers