Holy F--- I'm old. Windows 95 is 20 years old today.

[nlinecomputers]

http://www.neowin.net/news/back-to-the-start-windows-95-celebrates-its-20th-birthday

 

[callthatgirl]

I remember writing my first training manual "How to troubleshoot Windows 95 and Microsoft Word" for the computer lab student workers at my college. None of them read it of course, but oddly...the students themselves would grab it and use it haha. I was quite proud of that little guy!

I even had a section on the new laser printers, "If your print job is not printing ink, just open the lid and shake the toner, you don't need to ask the student workers to do that"....omg, we blazed through so much toner it was sick.

 

[Mike McCall]

I thought it was cool to install from CD rather than floppy's.

 

[OaksLabs]

I have a retail box Windows 95 still shrink wrapped. It's part of my collection of the strange and wonderful.

 

[allanc]

I thought it was cool to install from CD rather than floppy's.

Maybe ... but the operating system fit on a small number of 1.44 Mb floppies.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Maybe ... but the operating system fit on a small number of 1.44 Mb floppies.

Depends on your definition of small. It was on 13 floppies.

 

[OaksLabs]

Depends on your definition of small. It was on 13 floppies.

Your honor, exhibit A:

 

[TechLady]

I've seen that and wonder if it's real, because it makes no sense on so many levels.

 

[allanc]

Depends on your definition of small. It was on 13 floppies.

OK. 13 * 1.44 = 18.7 Mb
Windows 10 is about a 3 Gb download!

 

[allanc]

I've seen that and wonder if it's real, because it makes no sense on so many levels.

I think that the first floppy's label reads 1 of 3711.

 

[gadgetfixup]

What a ride it's been

 

[Moltuae]

I remember, around about that time, upgrading the memory on some PCs to cope with 95 ..... to a staggering 32MB. I can remember thinking "32 million bytes of RAM, that's crazy!"

Who remembers this song?:

It was of course a parody of the Windows 95 ad, which used The Rolling Stones' record 'Start Me Up':

 

[cypress]

Your honor, exhibit A:

LOL NICE!

 

[HCHTech]

There was a music video on the install CD or on a 2nd CD in the retail box, can't remember, but I do remember it was Edie Brickell. Cool stuff back then.

 

[phaZed]

Had a Weezer track on there. ---EDIT: No, Buddy Holly Song.. EDIT again: I was right on both accounts lol.. confused myself.

 

[frase]

woohoo

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It was so fancy compared to Win3.x
Yeah often doing the floppy install, as many computers didn't have the optical drives.

Yeah feeling old...I was long out of college.

Back then I was working at a point of sale software company...installing their software on computers, building the networks, peripherals, and shipping it out to stores.

 

[brandonkick]

My first real usages with a computer were on Win 95.

Oh how wonderful those days were, screeching dial up modems
that would be lucky to maintain 10 kb in my area. Web pages
taking 20-30 seconds each to load. Downloading adobe reader
all night long, only to have someone call and knock me offline
and then have to start it all over again!

The win95 machine itself had a pentium 166mhz processor and I think
8 mb of ram? We later upgraded, for a fair chunk of change, to 16mb ram.
No 5.25 floppy, but it did have a 3.5 floppy and an optical drive. Oh how
I remember that! The upgrade to win 98 was a mind blower, with the jungle
screen saver and all. I think that machine had a 1GB hard drive.

It wasn't until years later, some time around 1999 or 2000 that I got to use windows
3.1 for the first time. It was on my dad's work machine..... windows 3.1 wow what
a treat. Many kids my age don't even know what windows 3.1 was.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The win95 machine itself had a pentium 166mhz processor and I think
8 mb of ram? We later upgraded, for a fair chunk of change, to 16mb ram.
No 5.25 floppy, but it did have a 3.5 floppy and an optical drive. Oh how
I remember that! The upgrade to win 98 was a mind blower, with the jungle
screen saver and all. I think that machine had a 1GB hard drive.

It wasn't until years later, some time around 1999 or 2000 that I got to use windows
3.1 for the first time. It was on my dad's work machine..... windows 3.1 wow what
a treat. Many kids my age don't even know what windows 3.1 was.

166...heh....I remember spending such a LONG time customized a computer I ordered from Micron for myself....it was when the Pentium MMX" CPUs came out. Pentium 166MMX, my struggle was with how much RAM to get...as RAM was SOoooooo expensive back then with the EDO sticks. Did 24 gigs which held me for a while til I upgraded to Win98 and did 64 gigs. 2.1 gig HDD, Diamond Ultra 33.6 internal modem (ISA), had an S3 Virge graphics card with 4 megs of VRAM (about a year later I added the a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo card...for Quake GL)

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Prior that..my awesome Win3 rig....Acer Pentium 75...I had it overclocked to 100. WooHoo!