Happy birthday! I might start up my Pentium 133 just to boot Windows 95 today! (though I have OSR2 installed, not the original 20-year old release)

I have vivid memories of rushing to the local Harvey Norman (a local electrical goods retailer) for my copy (the CD based upgrade), which a mate and I went halvies in. We installed it on my 486 DX2 66 and it was love at first sight. The AU copy of the upgrade came with that Hovercraft game and some video clips, the most memorable of which being the Weezer "Happy Days" clip. Good times.

My P166, which is set-up next to me as we speak, has Windows 95 OSR2 installed on it and I use it regularly.

Yeah - Happy Birthday Win95! I keep 3 versions of the little fella up and running in the 'permanent' collection. Win98 made me completely forget about 95, but in the last few years I've become quit fond of it and tend to run my 95 retro rigs over the 98's...

I also see here that my post count is balanced on a nice '999'. I must make the next post count haha...

Love it or hate it, Windows 95 is one of the most important OSes of all time. I'm on the love it camp, it brought computers to the mainstream like few things have ever done after it.

Remember testing 95 through and up to the release of the final release.
Am I the only one remembering the April testrelease as the fastest?

Win95 was something fresh, something new. In a time of OS-chaos.

Was blown away when I saw win95 dialup stuff... up until that point we were using win3.11 + trumpet winsock , it felt ancient compared to win95. A very important OS indeed.

I remember the surreal excitement. Microsoft funded a huge hype train, and it worked. I remember watching interviews with the people lined up overnight to buy it. They were asked how much RAM they had. People were freely admitting they didn't have enough RAM yet, would have to wait till later to buy it, but still could not help standing there to get 95 immediately.

There was huge excitement welling up over computers at that time. Wired had been out for two years -- you could actually get this (then great) cutting edge magazine at the /grocery store/ BUT you also had to be there the day it arrived because it always sold right out, everywhere in town. Bill Gates' Microsoft releasing Windows95 was kind of a Huge Event of a Huge Event.

After that... yeah well. I remember the people who could only run in Safe Mode etc etc etc omgTHEreinstalls etc. But before the reality of 95 splattered on the windscreen, just before and during the release was pretty amazing.

This is what I remember.

(I do not think this song is copyrighted)

Prices on ram was skyhigh around that time. I was in luck, as I bought 4mb extra in February 95, making it a total of 8mb in my machine.
(had upgraded to a 80486DX2-66 the month before)

crazy, I remember installing Windows 95 on my dad's computer, had the floppy disk install which took ages.

I remember being impressed with Win95 at the time, unlike Win3.1 it seemed there were actually things to do (at least from the perspective of a 6 year old)

I remember that time vaguely.
Although, I didn't make the transition to Windows 95 straight away.
Back then, most of my games were DOS based. So, there was no immediate need but, this changed quickly.

It took me a while to warm up to Windows 95. I didn't install it on my P100 PC until mid-1996 and ran it alongside Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.2; it wasn't until mid-1997 that I finally erased Windows 3.11, leaving only Windows 95 and DOS 6.2 running on a P166MMX with 16mb of RAM. By 1998 I upgraded to OSR2.5 and 32mb of RAM and was finally feeling very comfortable with how the OS worked and behaved - this helped me make the transition to Windows 98 SE in early 2000 much easier and faster.

At present I have Windows 95A and DOS 6.2 installed on my old P166MMX with an Asus TX97-XE motherboard and 64mb of EDO RAM; it's not a speed demon, but works just fine for my needs. It's also one of my oldest PC builds, originally started in 2003 - and began to take its current shape in 2006.

(I know that relying on file date creation is not accurate in determining original install dates, but I have no other way to figure this out unless there's an application that works on Win95A or DOS and can find it for me).

And despite numerous hardware and software changes over the years my Win95A PC continues to cruise along, without much protest or concern. I certainly hope it continues to do so for many more years to come 😀

Old versions of CPUID PC Wizard used to work on Win9X (Not sure I ever tried 95 though) and could report the install date of the OS. I do not know where they dragged the data from or that it was accurate, but I do remember it being there.

Windows 95, back when I first started to properly pay attention to computers. Mostly as I was allowed access to one more often at that point, so they stopped being a remote idea, sci-fi and hi-tech gadgetry used by scientists with crazy hair and white coats. Gotta play me some Hover! damn you Microsoft, I still want that sequel.

Mates dad was a programmer and had a few OEM copies which I brought for $30 a month or 2 after it came out in Oz. We only had a PC for about 6 months and after a week or so hating it. Once I worked out start menu is "windows" and My computer is "dos" things got much easier, and was way more user friendly then Win3x ever was. Still had to drop back to dos for gaming though, poor little dx2 66 didn't have enough power to play them in windows.

The first OS I ever used, my all-time vintage favorite, and it got me started on using computers. Anybody wish to share their memorable times back in the day using Windows 95?

The oldest computer related memory I ever have , is me playing mine sweeper/solitaire on a windows 95 machine we had. I had no idea how to play them. This must have been in the year 1995.

I barely remember the memory and the machine. However , I still own the big tandy power switch that sat under the monitor to power it all.

There's a thread for Win95's birthday already:

Happy Birthday Win95

And here's what I posted about it:

Happy Birthday Win95

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

There's a thread for Win95's birthday already: […]
Show full quote

There's a thread for Win95's birthday already:

Happy Birthday Win95

And here's what I posted about it:

Happy Birthday Win95

By the way how did you manage to run Windows 95, Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 on the same computer? I thought Win95 would replace those earlier OS. Multiple hard drives, or a hack?

Yeah.... 20 years. Hmmmm.... Remember it as yesterday, when I ran the "Alpha", "Beta" and "Test" releases, prior to it's release.