Windows 95

~ the obit ~

Windows 95 went on general sale on 24 August 1995, after a release to manufacturing on 14 July. It asked for an Intel 386DX with 4 MB of memory, though Microsoft quietly recommended a 486 with 8 MB if you wanted it to be pleasant. It shipped on a stack of floppies for most people, because the CD-ROM drive was still an upgrade rather than a fitting.

What it actually did was merge two products into one. Before it, you booted MS-DOS and then ran Windows on top as an application. After it, there was one thing you installed and one thing you saw, with the Start button in the corner and a taskbar along the bottom holding your open windows. Long filenames arrived. Plug and Play arrived, worked sometimes, and earned a nickname for the times it did not. The shell it introduced is still recognizable on a machine bought this year, which is a strange thing to be able to say about software from 1995.

Two OEM service releases carried it further than the launch build could. OSR2 in August 1996 brought FAT32 so drives larger than 2 GB stopped being a problem, and a USB supplement followed. OSR2.5 in November 1997 folded in Internet Explorer 4, which is where the shell and the browser started growing into each other in a way that would later occupy several courtrooms.

It was on every machine I saw in Turkey in the late nineties. The first computer I got online with in 1998 ran it, over a modem that started at 14.4k, and the dial-up connection lived in a folder you opened by hand rather than something the machine did for you. Nobody I knew had bought a boxed copy. It came with the machine, or it came from a friend on a spindle of discs, which was simply how software moved in Ankara then.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the launch ~

Microsoft spent an estimated $1 billion on the campaign, which in 1995 was not a normal amount of money to spend telling people about an operating system. It licensed "Start Me Up" from the Rolling Stones for a figure the company put at $3 million and the press put considerably higher. The Empire State Building and the CN Tower were lit in Windows colors. There was a promotional video with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry in it, made at the exact moment that was the most expensive possible casting choice.

Stores opened at midnight. People stood in line for a box of floppies containing a graphical shell. Microsoft projected $720 million in first-day sales, and a million copies moved worldwide inside four days.

~ what was actually underneath ~

The marketing said MS-DOS was over. The engineering said otherwise: Windows 95 still booted through a DOS layer and still ran 16-bit code, and it would drop you to a real command prompt if you asked it nicely enough. This was deliberate, because the installed base of DOS software was enormous and an operating system that could not run it would have sold nothing.

The cost of that decision was stability. Cooperative multitasking meant one badly behaved program could take the machine with it, and a generation learned the phrase "this program has performed an illegal operation" by heart. The NT line running alongside it was the technically sounder product the whole time, and it took until Windows XP in 2001 for Microsoft to finally move consumers onto it.

~ the day it died ~

Mainstream support ended 31 December 2000. Extended support ended exactly one year later, on 31 December 2001, giving it the shortest extended window Microsoft has handed any consumer Windows release. By then Windows 98 had been out for three years, Windows Me had come and gone badly, and XP had shipped that October.

There was no announcement worth the name and no farewell page. A lifecycle table simply rolled over a date. The machines running it did not stop working, and plenty of them kept running in workshops and back offices for another decade, which is the more accurate ending: not switched off, just no longer anybody's problem.

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