Windows 95 is 25 years old today

Update 24 August 2020: Today marks the 25th anniversary of Windows 95. Check out our retrospective originally from its 20th anniversary below and slightly updated to reflect the new anniversary date.

Twenty-five years ago today, people were lying on CompUSA at midnight as Best Buy. It was not new Call of Duty game, Apple’s latest iPod, as well as all kinds of hardware just where customers are waiting. It was software, and not just software: Windows 95.

Windows’ release of Microsoft on August 24, 1995 was a highly anticipated launch. Jay Leno helped launch the software alongside Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, with a lot of jokes and the appearance of the entire Windows 95 development team on stage. It was an enormous day for Microsoft with TV commercials shaking the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up with images of the new Start Button we use today (almost). Microsoft even hired Jennifer Anniston and Matthew Perry to make an hour-long cyber-sitcom about Windows 95, and the software was so popular that 7 million copies were sold in the first five weeks.

Away from all the fanfare surrounding the launch, PC geeks could choose between Pentium or 486 processors, IDE or SCSI hard disks, dual-speed CD-ROMs, and Sound Blaster audio cards to experience the best of Windows 95. Microsoft added a lot of features for Windows 95, but the biggest was a new Start Button, menu, and taskbar that made it much easier to discover applications and navigate the operating system. Improvements to multitasking and the graphical interface were a big leap from Windows 3.1 and the days of MS-DOS, but the interface was rather similar for Macintosh and OS / 2 users at the time.

However, Windows 95 was not all about the Start Button. In addition to being a 32-bit OS, a major extension was support for long file names, up to 250 characters. It sounds like a basic feature in 2015, but at the moment, naming documents made it a lot easier. Another great feature was the introduction of Plug and Play, to automatically detect and install hardware. While the Plug and Play process has been greatly improved in more recent releases, the implementation of Windows 95 was often referred to as Plug and Pray, thanks to the often unreliable device installation process that resulted in IRQ conflicts and a lot of driver fun.

Microsoft had other equally ambitious plans for Windows 95. A new Microsoft Network (MSN) application came bundled with a prominent icon on the desktop. MSN is designed to provide access to email, chat rooms, newsgroups, and the first WWW homepages via a dial-up connection. Microsoft charges a monthly fee for accessing MSN, and if you use it more than three hours a month, there are additional charges. It was the early days of internet and dial-up connections, and MSN now exists as a web service through various custom apps like a browser.

Microsoft also introduced its first idea for synchronizing data between multiple machines in Windows 95. The My Briefcase was intended to synchronize files between a laptop and desktop machine, and in modern releases of Windows it is all cloud-based thanks to Microsoft’s OneDrive storage service . Microsoft even introduced user profile support in Windows 95 to log in multiple family members and have their own separate profiles with links and applications. If you were not familiar with all the new features of Windows 95, then you could have bought Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 at this time. It included the Internet Jumpstart Kit (an early version of Internet Explorer), theme support, and a number of system programs. Subsequent updates to Windows 95 also introduced new features before Windows 98 arrived three years later to improve things even more.

Enjoy a brief look back at Windows 95 in the photos and videos below, especially Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer dancing to “Start Me Up.” It’s classic, just like Windows 95.