Yep.

Well, it was revolutional, ok Windows 3.1x was the start of multimedia, with WinG and Video for Windows and QuickTime, but Win95 and DirectX and Start button revolutionised the PC.

I'm currently running Windows 95C on my old Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus and it runs pretty well (needs L2 cache).

Heck, I remember my dad inserting diskette after diskette when he was upgrading from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 back in 1995 on our family computer. CDs revolutionized the computer world (faster and easier). I'm planning on doing a video about Windows 95 sometime soon, as well as Windows 98SE (I have 2 systems that have Windows 98SE installed, 1 can run either 95C or 98SE, but no HDD installed ATM).

older than their "biggest fans" nowadays.

It's worth it to remember to use it only when needed which is how I considered it when it first came out. DOS ftw.

Whether you love or hate Windows 95 (or the company that made it), you can't deny that it made the PC accessible to the masses. Between new UI and the marketing campaign, it made people who had never even used a computer believe it was worth trying. It was also the first mass-market OS to offer protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking, and brought the promise of plug-and-play to the PC.

This was also the OS that re-defined the user experience, to such an extent that even Apple relented and adopted some of the conventions it introduced. Really, we haven't seen as much of a significant, successful and useful shift in UI design since then.

I would say that Windows 95 was an unmitigated success for Microsoft, flaws and all, and it is certainly worth remembering. It will have an important anniversary in two years. I'm curious to see if Microsoft will hold a commemorative event of some sort.

Windows 95 > Windows 10. On the subject here, I use Windows 95C to play DOS games since Windows 3.11 was giving me issues when I was attempting to play Doom in the OS itself. I do have my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus's hard drive set to boot into 3 choices:

1) MS-DOS for games
2) Safe Mode (MS-DOS)
3) Windows 95C

I need to install the MS-DOS drivers for the ESS AudioDrive ES1688F card (Acer brand) to use the joystick and play the good old MS-DOS games using either the FM Synth or the Yamaha DB50XG.

Although, I do like DOS a lot since I learned how to use MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 back in 1994 and I made a batch file for every game, within batch files per sound card (PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice (Lo-Tech Tandy 3 Voice compatible sound card), Adlib/OPL3 + SFX, Roland MT-32 (Music Quest MPU-401 Clone Card), and GM/XG for Doom and other games that support it).

bjwil1991 wrote:

On the subject here, I use Windows 95C to play DOS games since Windows 3.11 was giving me issues when I was attempting to play Doom in the OS itself.

Windows 3.11 was never a real (full) OS, just a graphical shell on top of DOS, and you were not supposed to play DOS games from within it (although some worked).

dr_st wrote:

Windows 3.11 was never a real (full) OS, just a graphical shell on top of DOS

To an extent, the same argument could be made about Windows 9x, just a different version of DOS and a different shell.

That is indeed partially true, although with 9x the Windows subsystem took upon itself replacement of more DOS functions, and at the same time improved the virtual DOS environment for running DOS apps from within the GUI.

Anyone who isn't using Windows 95 daily shall be burned at the stake.

The never-ending story!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdoznE72jGg

dr_st wrote:

That is indeed partially true, although with 9x the Windows subsystem took upon itself replacement of more DOS functions, and at the same time improved the virtual DOS environment for running DOS apps from within the GUI.

The same is true for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 also. It can be called a "Network OS", at least. 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_operating_system

Skyscraper wrote:

The never-ending story!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdoznE72jGg

LoL. Back in the days, "Windows" was described as a "set of poorly debugged device drivers" by the Netscape people.
That was around the time when Win95 was the shining new star on the horizon.. Guess which version they meant. 😉

Muz wrote:

Is it worth to remember this OS?

It was codenamed Chicago for the longest time, and the first Microsoft OS, besides Windows NT, that looked like progressing from AmigaOS as a gaming/ multimedia platform for me. So it arrived 10 years later than AmigaOS, but I still have fond memories of it.

640K!enough wrote:

dr_st wrote:

Windows 3.11 was never a real (full) OS, just a graphical shell on top of DOS

To an extent, the same argument could be made about Windows 9x, just a different version of DOS and a different shell.

and often this falsehood is used as an argument for DOSbox to support Win9X in so many cases. 🙄

Win9x is the OS that COMPLAINS about DOS TSRs/REAL MODE DRIVERS being loaded and goes BSOD over it...

I remember a girl in the office giving me a Windows 95 mug when the OS rolled out and I think I still have my Win95 upgrade CD around purchased when it came out.
Switching from WFW to W95 wasn't that bad, I liked the new interface and the only real issue was getting drivers for the hardware you already owned. Since I was a gamer back then as well as doing real work with computers I loved how joystick and sound support ended up being done in the OS instead of having to do it in each game like in the DOS days. You had no Internet Explorer but also no USB support along with no fat32 until version 95C so I can see why people now avoid it and just do 98se.

leileilol wrote:

and often this falsehood is used as an argument for DOSbox to support Win9X in so many cases. 🙄

Win9x is the OS that COMPLAINS about DOS TSRs/REAL MODE DRIVERS being loaded and goes BSOD over it...

Falsehood? I guess you disagree with Bill Gates, then (video link). Like it or not, Windows 9x depended on real-mode drivers for some hardware support in the early days, in spite of the performance and stability costs that that could incur. Many other peripherals needed their DOS tools to initialise the hardware before the early Windows 9x drivers would work. I think it's safe to say that Windows 9x "sat on top of MS-DOS", as Mr. Gates put it, much like its predecessors. As much as they tried to reduce its usage of DOS services as it evolved, the fact remains that "underneath, MS-DOS was running there".

Win9x is indeed the evolution of Win 3.x, but whatever subtle balances shifted in the transition, certainly justified calling it "an OS using DOS as a bootloader", rather than "a shell on top of DOS".

I think that Win9x does not ever need any DOS device drivers, in principle. However, as some manufacturers did not provide proper Windows device drivers for their hardware, Win9x could still use the real-mode device drivers, to provide compatibility. The same approach (maintaining compatibility with an older driver model) has been used here and there with every new major Windows version.

Also, I don't know what exactly they did, but compatibility with DOS games running in an emulated DOS window also increased greatly inside Windows 9x compared to Win 3.x. With Win9x, the average DOS user/gamer could really boot into the Windows GUI most of the time, and most his games/apps would work; restarting in MS-DOS mode would become an exception, rather than the norm; the same cannot be said of Win3.x.

dr_st wrote:

Win9x is indeed the evolution of Win 3.x, but whatever subtle balances shifted in the transition, certainly justified calling it "an OS using DOS as a bootloader", rather than "a shell on top of DOS".

That's the whole point I'm making, though: it specifically wasn't an OS that just used DOS as a boot-loader. Some early versions of Linux, among others, allowed that approach, but they would completely eliminate any trace of the initial DOS environment from the memory map; Windows 9x didn't do this. Though it may have been used less frequently in well-configured installations that didn't have some sort of poorly-supported legacy hardware, the DOS environment was there. There was, in fact, an additional VM, based on the initial DOS start-up environment, that was maintained and duplicated as the base environment for running MS-DOS-based software. Furthermore, the possibility existed, however infrequently it was used, for the core system to shift into real mode, allow the execution of DOS system code, then switch back to the protected-mode Windows environment to forward the results of the service that was accessed.

So, really, it was more than just a shell, as it could run, in many configurations, without ever resorting to running real-mode DOS system code. However, one also can't justify calling it a stand-alone, non-DOS-based OS. There is no way, as far as I'm aware, to start Windows 9x without a complete DOS environment in place.