It was on August 24, 1995 that Windows 95 was released, amidst much anticipation. It was the most widely anticipated Windows release of all time, and the runner up really isn’t close. The idea of people lining up for blocks for a Microsoft product sounds like a bit of a joke today, and the more time goes on, the bigger of a joke it becomes. But I’m serious that in 1995 it happened.
Why Windows 95 was a big deal
Windows 95 promised to be the biggest leap Windows users had experienced to date. Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.0 before it were both runaway successes, but they had limits. They could multitask, but it wasn’t modern pre-emptive multitasking. Instead, the applications cooperated rather than the operating system being able to hand out resources. This meant a poorly behaved program could do a lot more to gum up the works in 1994 than it can do today, since the operating system just had to trust all of the programs to cooperate fairly.
Windows 3.x also didn’t scale all that well. The optimal processor for Windows 3.1 is a 486. Brand doesn’t matter much. And the optimal speed is right around 100 MHz. Somewhere around that point, it hits the wall. Switching from a 100 MHz 486 to a 100 MHz Pentium doesn’t yield much of a speed increase for most operations. I was selling computers at retail in 1994 and 1995, and people were plenty curious about Pentium-based PCs. But when they saw a 486 next to a Pentium and both were running Windows 3.1, most people I talked to saved their money. They just couldn’t find enough things the Pentium did faster.
Anticipation of Windows 95
Just about everyone was looking forward to Windows 95. Consumers were eager for the new benefits, even if they didn’t quite understand what they would be. Computer hardware makers were looking forward to the boost in sales. Retailers were looking forward to the boost in sales, of both software and hardware.
I started at Best Buy in late May 1994, 15 months before Windows 95’s release. I got questions about Windows 95 pretty much from day 1. And the corporate office was training us on how to suggest upsells pretty much from the day I started too. This was a bit of a shift. Best Buy did not want its employees talking about the Pentium CPU before it was released, because that might cause consumers to hold off on a purchase.
But they did want them talking about Windows 95, and just emphasize that a computer they bought that day would run Windows 95 when it came out the next year. And that would set the trap. They’d come back and buy the upgrade for $80 the next summer and find that it ran like crap. Then they’d come back for a new video card, more RAM, and maybe a bigger hard drive, turning that $80 purchase into $500 worth of purchases.
Windows 95’s hardware requirements
The box stated that it required a 386DX or better processor, 4 MB of more of RAM, and approximately 50 MB of disk space. Nothing stopped you from installing it on a 386SX. I know because I tried it, mostly out of morbid curiosity. It took forever to install. Booting took forever too. And once it managed to boot, it took forever to do anything.
But if you had a system that met the minimum stated requirements, the experience was still pretty terrible.
The minimum most of us recommended at the time for acceptable performance was a 486 faster than 33 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of disk space. And some will take issue with that today, because the experience on a machine like that still wasn’t very good. You had to draw the line somewhere, and then, as now, different people had different definitions of words like “minimum” and “acceptable.”
You really needed a Pentium-class machine to be happy with Win95, and I think Win95 did a lot to goose Pentium sales for Intel. If you could afford a 100 or 120 MHz Pentium with 16 or 32 MB of RAM and at least a 540 megabyte hard drive, you were much happier with it.
What was Windows 95?
Then, as now, Windows 95 had no shortage of misunderstanding. It still had DOS at its core, although there were people who said otherwise, both then and now. The shell was all 32-bit code, and more of the critical functions moved into the 32-bit space. But it wasn’t a fully 32-bit operating system like Windows XP would later be.
Another cause for misunderstanding was feature erosion. Windows 95 was late, and some features didn’t make it into the final build. Microsoft revisited some of those elements and released them in Windows 98 or ME. When you look at some of the beta builds for Windows 95, they resemble Windows 98 more than they resemble the initial August 24, 1995 build of Win95.
The cashflow bonanza
I can only speculate how much money Microsoft made by selling $79 upgrades to people who quickly found their old machines couldn’t run it happily, so they came back to buy a new machine with Win95 pre-installed. Retailers were hoping for that too. Or at the very least, they expected to sell a lot of RAM and video card and hard drive upgrades. Because the trade-off with Windows 95 was that while it took better advantage of high-end hardware than previous Windows versions did, it also required higher end hardware to run well.
Some percentage of people bought the $79 upgrade, found the computer they had wasn’t up to the task of running it well, and came back to the store to talk about options. I attended training sessions designed to help employees navigate those discussions. Those of us who passed all the tests got special badges proclaiming us Windows 95 experts.
Software and new hardware came with a Designed for Windows 95 logo to help customers select items that would be compatible, as opposed to leftover Windows 3.1 products that may or may not work as well with the new OS.
Why Windows 95 succeeded
Windows 95 succeeded because it was more intuitive to use than Windows 3.1 had been, and it was a lot more stable. It wasn’t truly a full 32-bit operating system, because there was still MS-DOS at the core if you dug deep enough. But it was a big enough improvement not many people cared. It also helped that Microsoft had a 32-bit version of Microsoft Office available on the same day. Office 95 was more stable running on Windows 95 than the others guys’ 16-bit office suites based around Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect.
Dealing with marginal systems: My specialty
My first employer didn’t have the money to replace all its 486s with Pentiums right away. So tweaking Win95 to run adequately on 486DX2 machines with 16 MB of RAM and sub-500 MB hard drives quickly became my specialty. I couldn’t make it great, but I could at least get those machines running well enough that everyone could do their job on them.
Over time I built a large collection of tricks to squeeze more performance out of Win95, and some of them actually worked. When former coworkers who’d moved on to other opportunities started asking me for copies of my tips compilation, I started to wonder if I had something. O’Reilly, better known as a publisher of Unix books, agreed with me that I did, so I expanded my tricks with detailed explanations and turned it into a book.
Initially I was rather lukewarm about Win95 because it did very little that OS/2 didn’t do better, but Win95 was much more approachable. Microsoft’s marketing was never as good as Apple’s, but there’s a much shorter distance between Apple and Microsoft than there is between Microsoft and IBM. It was around the time of Win95 that we stopped talking about IBM-compatible PCs and just started calling them Windows PCs or, merely PCs.
It’s a stretch to call Windows 95 great. It was far better than Windows 3.1 was, but so were a lot of things. It did make Windows a lot more approachable and easier to use. Love it or hate it, Windows 95 did leave a formidable legacy even before it gave way to Windows 98.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.