Windows 95 was officially published to the public on August 24, 1995, establishing the standard for the future of the emblematic operating system of the technology giant.
The operating system has proven to be extremely successful, with seven million copies sold during its first five weeks, making it the most popular operating system in the world.
Microsoft even organized a starry celebration event to mark the first anniversary of its launch, boasting that it had sold 40 million units at that time.
Windows 95 has made major changes
A combination of factors has led to the success of Windows 95, in particular the new “Plug and Play” approach to the technology giant for the installation of equipment, which has proven to be very popular in the markets of consumers and businesses.
This allowed the operating system to detect compatible hardware or automatically install software. If in doubt, it prompted the user to put a disk for installation.
30 years later, the idea of using a disc to install software seems to be a distant memory for the most part, but at the time was a huge decision for the company.
What happened behind the scenes is Microsoft’s real silver manufacturer, however. With the launch, Windows 95 merged with the Microsoft disk operating system (MS-DOS), an online command operating system developed by the technology giant for compatibility with IBM PCS.
By merging, the operating system has made marked improvements compared to its predecessor, with specific gains in the graphic user interface (GUI).
Elsewhere, Windows 95 announced the company’s lag of 16 -bit architecture used in Windows 3.1 to 32 bit. This once again offered the advantages marked for users, especially in areas such as random access memory (RAM).
For individual users, Windows 95 has considerably improved quality of life, by introducing new key features that remain to date.
New brilliant toys for Microsoft stores
The introduction of the start -up menu and the taskbar.
The company has spent millions of dollars on a global marketing campaign featuring the Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” to promote the introduction of functionality-how can we forget the launch event of Windows 95 with song Blaring in the background.
The taskbar was also a new idea for a Windows operating system, and on the wider public PC market had no real counterpart. Giving users the possibility of finding and opening applications from a singular contact point has changed the situation for many.
Better still, the operating system also allowed users to follow the applications they were performing, helping to unclog their system and prioritize certain tasks with high calculation intensity.
Even simple modifications to Windows 95 attracted it with users, such as the possibility of giving files and folders 255 character names. It seems absurd today, but in the previous operating system ‘, it had proven to be a major point of collision for many.
User profiles have also been added, giving several people the possibility of using their own unique configuration on a single device – a real game changer for families.
Before his time
We are all now well used to cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive and OneDrive – they are among the woodwork for users on consumer and businesses.
Windows 95 was ahead of his time in this regard with the introduction of the “case”.
This allowed users to save and synchronize files, which means that you would not lose these vital documents or materials and that you can keep them at hand when you have returned home or worked outside the office.
In particular, the case was dragging for a while, because the functionality was always available in Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 – in fact, it was not before Windows 8 that it was officially obsolete.
