Posted on 08/23/2015 8:32:43 AM PDT by dayglored
The arrival of Microsoft Windows 95 on 24 August 1995 brought about a desktop PC boom. With an easier and more intuitive graphical user interface than previous versions, it appealed to more than just business, and Bill Gates’s stated aim of one PC per person per desk was set in motion. This was a time of 320MB hard drives, 8MB of RAM and 15-inch CRT monitors. For most home users, the Internet had only just arrived.
Windows 95 introduced the Start menu, powered by a button in the bottom-left corner of the desktop. This gives a central point of entry into menus from which to choose commands and applications. The simplicity of this menu enables users to easily find commonly used documents and applications. All subsequent versions of Windows have kept this menu, with the notable exception of Windows 8, a change which prompted an enormous backlash.
We take these intuitive graphic interfaces for granted today, but earlier operating systems such as DOS and CP/M allowed the user to interact using only typed text commands. This all changed in the 1970s, with Ivan Sutherland’s work with Sketchpad and the use of lightpens to control CRT displays, Douglas Engelbart’s development of the computer mouse, and the Xerox Parc research team’s creation of the Windows Icon Menu Pointer graphical interfaces paradigm (Wimp) — the combination of mouse pointer, window and icons that remains standard to this day.
By the early 1980s, Apple had developed graphical operating systems for its Lisa (released in 1983) and Macintosh (1984) computers, and Microsoft had released Windows (1985).
All these interfaces rely on the central idea of the desktop, a comprehensible metaphor for a computer. We work with information in files and organise them in folders, remove unwanted information to the trash can...
(Excerpt) Read more at techcentral.co.za ...
Well, we built another house, and Jerry's music was still played, ... but the thing that arguably had the most lasting effect on daily life was that Graphical User Interface and "Start Menu" of Windows 95. 20 years later, it still reigns supreme over more than 3/4 of the world's computers, and appears (via Windows 7 in some form) on all of mine...
Nostalgia time, folks.... :-)
I still play Hover.
![](http://i.imgur.com/1rNMhZF.jpg"; "”source:")
http://www.techcentral.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/windows-95-640-2.jpg
I still use it a couple times a year to collect data with a piece of equipment I can’t replace.
I still have a little Toshiba Protege notebook that will boot W95 and even (on a good day) connect to the internet so I can see just how obsolete a browser from that era has become.
Oh I remember it well when they rolled it out at the major defense corporation I was working at the time. Printing to a shared network printer was one massive nightmare and required the carful nurturing and attention of the IT staff. It seemed the print drivers were never up to the task.
In the mid-90's I was working for a software outfit doing (among other things) drivers for Windows devices. Let me assure you, it was just as much of a nightmare from the development side as it was from the user side! :-)
It's a good article, but it is hardly the case that we went from DOS prompts to Windows 95 which would appear to be the case if you had no prior knowledge of early PC OS history. Windows 95 replaced the earlier Windows, Windows 2.x, and Windows 3.x which had in fact replaced DOS. Windows 3.1 was in wide use from 1990 until the introduction of Windows 95.
Remember it well. I’ll be 61 0n Aug. 24th. Bought my first computer with Win 95 in 1996. A Micron 200. With the 15” Sony monitor it came to just over $3400. Last year I bought the latest Mac Mini for a little over $600.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocmJE2O4uIU
Windows 95 “Start Me Up” commercial.
It cost Microsoft $3 million to license.
I used Win2.x and 3.1 (and 3.11 WfW) extensively, and switched into Win95 sometime in early 1996. But to be sure, I was still using DOS for a lot tasks, so I only invoked the "WIN" command when needed. OTOH, most of the DOS world was switching over into Windows as fast as they could by about 1990.
AH YES!!! I could never listen to that Stones tune again without remembering that ad....
I remember my computer crashed all the time when it had Windows 95. Could have been a cheap computer, too.
Gates stole the GUI from Commodore who did not have the accumen to fight him in court.
I had to wait a couple of years before getting it. Biggest reason was that my Pentium II didn’t have a CD-Rom drive at the time! I wanted that “Start bar” so bad I downloaded any freeware knockoff to emulate it on my 3.11 for Workgroups machine, until I finally got it (a CD-Rom drive and a bootleg copy of Win95) for my 17th birthday.
Next to System 7, it’s the OS that I loved the best from back then. Especially the “Plus” themes.
Yes. The big jump was 3.1.
We still have at least one Windows NT 4.0 machine running 24 hrs a day 365. That was a good vintage.
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