Windows 95 has turned 30 years this weekend. An outstanding anniversary for development that – for good or for less well – marked a point without return in the Evolution and subsequent development of consumer computer science. It also meant the beginning of the Microsoft monopoly into operating systems and turned Bill Gates into the richest person in the world.
And it is that Windows 95 was A bombing since its launch. Sales added 720 million dollars only the first day and managed to distribute a million copies in the first four days. For the first anniversary, in 1996, Microsoft had sold 40 million copies, it was licensed by 400 hardware suppliers and had 4,500 compatible applications.
In addition to its technical novelties, another part of success was a Marketing campaign that had never been done to sell software. Microsoft invested the a whopping of 300 million dollars of the time and allocated 14 million dollars to pay copyright to the Rolling Stones for the use of their song ‘Start Me Up’.
The advertising campaign was brutal, it lasted a year since the previous announcement and the day of the launch was a phenomenon, also as a cultural event, something never seen in the zeros and some industry. To put it in context, to say that he got the greatest enthusiasts They would queue to Buy at midnight of the launch (under payment of $ 209) The 13 floppies where the original distribution was made. Imagine the differences with, for example, the current Windows 11 to which users do not want to migrate or free.
30 years of Windows 95
Beyond marketing, we must highlight the large number of news presented by the system, starting with the premiere of a User Graphical Interface real and components that have reached this day as the novel start button-menu and the taskbar that incomprehensibly 30 years later does not like users. It was a fundamental jump from the past developments of Microsoft, MS-DOS and Windows 3.X, whom Microsoft intended to merge.
Windows 95 too premiered the 32 bits with the consequent increase in performance especially in areas such as the random access memory (RAM) and a multitasking that had never been seen in Windows systems. Another great advance came from support Plug&Play that greatly facilitated the installation of peripherals and was very popular in consumer and professionals. This allowed the operating system to detect compatible hardware or install software automatically. In case of doubt, he asked the user to insert an album for the installation.
Microsoft did not stop there and was improving the development with five services pack that added important concepts such as the FAT-32 file system, the USB peripheral connection port, the UDMA data transfer bus or the AGP graphics port.
It also included the Internet Explorer browser by default, getting defenstra to the Netscape who was an absolute leader until then. Facilitate the execution of PC games As never before it was another of the great bets and served to also monopolize this field for decades. The possibility of using long file names, with the possibility of assigning names of 255 characters to files and folders, was another news.
Another component remembered and that has ended up going to computer history, was the melody that sounded at the start of Windows 95. Composed of Brian Eno, was based on 150 adjectives that Microsoft sent him as “sexy”, “provocative”, “nostalgic” or “sentimental”. That list had to be musically condensed in 3.8 seconds and the composer got it. Point out that The melody was created in a Mac Because the author did not like Windows …
Do you want to try Windows 95?
The operating system is a historical piece that has behaved to a large number of devices, from an Xbox to an iPhone, through Android tablets. It can also be executed in a web browser or on virtual machines, although the best experience is still offered by the equipment for which it was conceived: PCs.
Here highlights a version created by the Slack developer based on Electron, an open source framework that allows the development of desktop graphic applications using customer-server components for web applications and with Chromium as an interface. Written completely in JavaScript, it is not a native application, but it is enough to test it on the supported platforms, Any Windows and Also Linux or Mac. All versions are available on the project page in Github.
How time passes … 30 years of the launch of Windows 95, the most popular and successful operating system in history and development that allowed Microsoft to begin to dominate computer desks in a monopoly that reaches to this day.
