Happy Birthday Windows95

Washington Post ^ | Thursday, August 24, 1995 | David Segal

[N3WBI3]

With Windows 95's Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype

By David Segal Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, August 24, 1995; Page A14

You can hide under a bridge, row a boat to the middle of the ocean or wedge yourself under the sofa, cover your ears and then hum loudly. But get near a newspaper, radio, television or computer retailer today and you will experience the multimillion-dollar hype surrounding the launch of Windows 95.

Microsoft Corp. is spending about $300 million to trumpet the arrival of Windows 95, an upgraded operating system, the software that tells the machinery inside your personal computer what to do. Marketing mavens believe the all-out media blitz is the largest product advertising campaign ever. Print ads – from both Microsoft and increasingly giddy computer retailers – have been inescapable over the past few weeks.

[1Old Pro]

Yep, the recommended configuration for '95 was a 486 DX/66 with 8MB of RAM. You described exactly the system I first ran it on, and it worked fine.

Me too, with a 100meg hard drive. I believe it was a Dell notebook that cost $2000+, UGH, now it's not even worth using for a phonebook.

[antiRepublicrat]

Me too, with a 100meg hard drive.

486/66, 8MB RAM, 340MB HDD, 2MB Diamond Viper VLB, 2x CD-ROM, 15" monitor. Total cost: $3,000. Our 1x CD writer we got at work at the same time cost us $3,000 alone, plus the 1GB HDD to hold a CD image and that could handle writing (not all could) was rediculous.

[clyde asbury]

I was so excited about Windows 95 I bought three copies that day!

There were lines for Windows 95 as if it was the latest Star Wars release. Come to think of it, I never understood those, either.

MS pushed the release date later several times, and soon it was called Windows circa 95.

[Doohickey]

Windows 95 changed the way we game. Remember having to set up a separate memory config for almost every game you wanted to play under DOS?

[Doohickey]

You know, that actually ran pretty well for me. I got lucky though - it was a huge POS.

[js1138]

DOS 4.0, Win95, Win ME.

The hall of shame.

Acually the DOS version was an IBM proct. MS put out 4.01 that mostly worked.

[bitt]

I loved win95, but then, I liked rebooting...gave you a chance to think about what task you were going to tackle next...

We were loading programs that required 20 floppies and 4 reboots per machine - those were the days...."tick..tick..tick..flickflickflick...gulp!"

[TechJunkYard]

This Windows 95... it's sucking up my drive...

[Xenalyte]

I was doing tech support for a money manager at the time, and one of my analysts stood in line at midnight to get the earliest copy.

Wow, what a step up it was from 3.11 . . . and what a fight I had on my hands with the hidebound 3.11 users who were damned and determined not to learn 95.

[Xenalyte]

I had one 3.11 user who would NOT upgrade. He refused. So I had to support dual platforms for three years.

He also never shut down his PC - he just turned it off using the power button. When I found that out, I kicked him out of his office and ran Scandisk and Defrag.

Scandisk found and fixed about a thousand errors, and Defrag took all night to finish. I started it around two in the afternoon, and it was just finishing up when I got back at eight the next morning.

[ShadowAce]

LOL! That's a great song!

[avg_freeper]

That's what I liked about 3.11. All it took to keep the thing running smooth was a bimonthly maintenance schedule. I could also narrow down and zap conflicts with ease. Information on how to do all that was widely disseminated at the user level with step by step directions.

With Windows 95 I continuously had problems I could only solve by wiping the disk and reinstalling everything. I found that much of that was due to corrupted registry items. Techniques for maintaining a stable Windows 95 registry just weren't widely known at the home user level.

And so the day someone showed me how a Mac could rebuild and correct its registry (called the desktop) at the press of a button I ran out and purchased one. Things have changed quite a bit since then with MS's solid XP Pro and Apple's complex and sometimes quirky OS X.

[Bush2000]

Did they ever figure out that one of the key lines in the song "Start Me Up" that they used to promote this was: You make a grown man cry"?

Thanks for the laugh. That was very funny. ;-)

[SamAdams76]

I still have a shrink-wrapped edition of Microsoft Encarta. Maybe it will be worth money someday. I know I paid about $100 for it.

That was supposed to be the next big thing. Having your encyclopedia on CD-ROM. But it was infuriating because searching an article, you would have to wait for your CD-ROM to spin up and find it. Or you'd get a message telling you to "Insert Disc 5" and you'd have to be constantly changing out discs, like you were a DJ in a roller skating rink.

I also had the National Geographic CD set - which was something like 24 different discs. That was nuts. And within a few months, half the discs had read errors and stopped working altogether. It was a waste of money.

The late 1990s - I spent a lot of money on computer junk. Like those "zip" drives that held something like 100MB of data. That was considered a lot at the time. Magazine adds would have a stack of a hundred floppies and one zip drive disc - to show you the difference.

Now you would have floppy discs going up to the moon to show how much storage we have at our disposal today.

It's all very weird.

[right way right]

I am going to play some Hover.