>It wasn’t truly a full 32-bit operating system, because there was still MS-DOS at the core if you dug deep enough.
Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!
The way Windows 95 could use DOS device drivers despite being 32-bit was fairly incredible. I think that fooled a lot of people into thinking it really was running on top of DOS, when in reality, once it has booted, the reverse is the case. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...
"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."
I had a Pentium 100MHz, and 8MB was acceptable, although I had a friend with 16MB and a 166MHz, and the grass always seemed greener. He was able to play Tomb Raider.
I remember being 15, that August. We were excited for this release. My dorky friends and I went to a local computer store and tried to get the clerk to show us what Windows 95 was like. He had a pre-release version installed on one of their computers. I don't even remember how we knew.
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
I tried a beta and was unimpressed. I tried to talk my dad out of buying it because it sucked... He went to the store and bought it with 4x4M EDO RAM DIMMs.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
Ya, could be. We didn't get a copy at home for a while. Mostly, I remember when we got a new 486, which did have Windows 95. It was a multimedia machine with a CD-ROM and a fancy new copy of Myst. I remember being totally blown away.
Funny to think of W95 like some kind of luxury that a shopkeeper has to keep teenagers out, as if you were trying to test drive a Mercedes, or trying out guitars like that scene from Wayne's World (1992)
If you have 90 minutes with nothing else to do I highly recommend giving the launch event with Jay Leno a watch.. it's really something unique. https://youtu.be/_JzfROUDsK0
My 10 year old brain was blown when I discovered the Buddy Holly music video on the Windows 95 CD. I just couldn't comprehend the idea of a music video being played on a computer. Felt like magic. Such different times.
Shouldn't we rather celebrate the GA of Windows NT4 Workstation on August 24, 1996? It was 30 years ago and an amazing OS that at least for some tasks made me switch back from SuSe Linux.
It was amazing, I was doing my first year in software engineering at the time and it felt like the future, the multimedia was impressive.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
I was living in Seattle that summer, and Apple had plastered the city buses with big ads that week, and they simply stated,
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
The article left out the triumphant arrival of long filenames.
That summer also marked the end of all my attempts to get friends and coworkers to switch to OS/2... although my linux experiments were ramping up at about the same time. Heady days!
That's funny. Somehow it completely escaped my notice.
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
^that's "CONGRATULATIONS w95" ... didn't see it at first ;)
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)
Me and my colleagues had been downloading preview versions for months and it was such a revelation compared to 3.11. Except, it was (under the covers) still MS-DOS based.
I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.
Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.
Kind of insane to think about how in the span of 30 years we went from Win95 / DOOM-style games to UE5 and effective (to some degree) large language models. In a year-over-year view not much changes, but decade-over-decade is quite a different story.
When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.
Kind of but not really. As I understand it some of the OS/2 dev team at Microsoft was involved in NT (after MS and IBM stopped working on OS/2 together) but they aren't the same code. The NT core is more closely related to DEC VMS than to OS/2. It can be confusing because the name OS/2 was applied to things that are NT at certain points along the way, and NT did have an OS/2 compatibility layer
I was so excited to install this and finally be rid of Win 3.11. I was 13 or so when this came out and really just coming into my own with IT stuff, building PCs and whatnot. It was really mind blowing back then.
There have been so many Desktop Environments over the years, but I still feel that Windows 95 perfected the desktop experience.
Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
I still remember some kid at school swearing that if the release date slipped into 1996 that Microsoft would get the US government to keep the calendar 1995.
Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!
When Windows didn't have a driver for some hardware, it would tell you it's "using 16-bit driver" (or was it DOS driver?). So it's all 32-bit.
Hah, this reminds me of Win32s on Windows 3.1x...
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."
I had a Pentium 100MHz, and 8MB was acceptable, although I had a friend with 16MB and a 166MHz, and the grass always seemed greener. He was able to play Tomb Raider.
I make a lot of retro videos and tested a 386 on 4MB of RAM here: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#9-26-24-wi...
https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/z486/ https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about One can make Windows 95 solar powered again. The first time was at ISSCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juy8xP-hUtA
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
My 486 only had 4MB of RAM and I couldn't afford the $400-$500 to take it to 16GB so I actually switched to Linux in August of 95, amusingly enough.
I was soooo excited when my family bought a PC with 95 on it. My best friend, who had Windows 3.1, was so jealous.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
There was Windows NT and OS2/Warp too.
I didn't play a lot with the BSD variants.
It was truly a magical time for OS enthusiasts.
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
The article left out the triumphant arrival of long filenames.
That summer also marked the end of all my attempts to get friends and coworkers to switch to OS/2... although my linux experiments were ramping up at about the same time. Heady days!
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.
Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.
When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.
That makes me wonder what the first pirated song was that was ripped to MP3 and provided for download over the Internet...
When Windows Vista got released I switched over to Mac.
Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
Microsoft dominated the 90s like no other.