Windows 95 was officially released to the public on August 24, 1995, setting the standard for the future of the tech giant’s iconic operating system.
The operating system was found to be extremely successful with seven million copies sold in the first five weeks, making it the world’s most popular operating system.
Microsoft even organized a star -studded celebration event to mark the one year anniversary of launch and boast that it had sold 40 million units at that time.
Windows 95 brought major changes
A combination of factors led to Windows 95’s success, especially Tech Giant’s new “Plug and Play” approach to the installation of hardware, which proved to be very popular across both consumer and business markets.
This allowed the operating system to detect compatible hardware or automatically install software. If in doubt, it caused the user to put a disk in for installation.
Thirty years later, the idea of using a disk for installation of software is as a distant memory for most people, but at that time it was a big step for the company.
What happened behind the scenes, however, was the real money producer for Microsoft. With the launch, Windows 95 merged with Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), a command line developed by Tech Giant for compatibility with IBM PCS.
When merging these, the operating system provided significant improvements compared to its predecessor with special gains in the graphic user interface (GUI).
Elsewhere, Windows 95 invited the company’s shifts away from a 16-bit architecture used in Windows 3.1 to 32-bit. This once again offered significant benefit benefits for users, especially in areas such as Random Access Memory (RAM).
For individual users, the Windows 95 great quality of life improved and introduced the most important new features that are still left today.
Shiny new toys for Microsoft stores
Among the largest new features for the operating system was the introduction of the starting menu and the taskbar.
The company spent millions of dollars on a global marketing campaign with Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” to promote the introduction of the feature – how can we forget the Windows 95 launch event with the song that blares in the background.
The assignment line was also a new idea for a Windows operating system, and in the wider PC market for consumer had no real counterpart. Giving users the opportunity to find and open applications from a unambiguous point of contact was a game election for many.
Even better, the operating system also enabled users to keep track of what applications they were running, help to declle their system and prioritize certain calculation -intensive tasks.
Even simple changes to Windows 95 loved it with users as the opportunity to give files and folders 255 character names. It sounds inappropriate today, but in the past us’ this had turned out to be a big sticky point for many.
User profiles were also added, giving more people the opportunity to use their own unique setup on a single device – a real game change for families.
Prior to its time
We are all now well adapted to Sky Storage Platforms such as Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive and OneDrive – they are part of the woodwork for users in both consumer and business markets.
Windows 95 was ahead of its time in this regard with the introduction of ‘Data Folder’.
This enabled users to store and sync files, which means you wouldn’t lose the vital documents or materials and be able to keep them by hand when you returned or worked outside the office.
In particular, the briefcase hung around for a while as the feature was still available in Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 – in fact, it wasn’t until Windows 8 that it was officially printed.
