Windows 95 officially launched the public on August 24, 1995, establishing the standard for the future of the iconic operating system of the technological giant.
The operating system proved to be very successful, with seven million copies sold in its first five weeks, which makes it the most popular operating system in the world.
Microsoft even organized a celebration event full of stars to commemorate the first anniversary of its launch, boasting that it had sold 40 million units at that time.
Windows 95 brought big changes
A combination of factors led to the success of Windows 95, particularly the new “plug and play” approach to the technological giant to install hardware, which was very popular in consumer and companies markets.
This allowed the operating system to detect compatible hardware or automatically install the software. In case of doubt, it led the user to put an album for the installation.
30 years later, the idea of using an album to install software seems like a distant memory for most, but at that time it was a great movement for the company.
However, what happened behind the scene was the true money manufacturer for Microsoft. With the launch, Windows 95 merged with the Microsoft Disco Operating System (MS-DOS), an command line operating system developed by the technological giant for compatibility with the IBM PCs.
When merging them, the operating system delivered marked improvements compared to its predecessor, with particular profits in the User Graphical Interface (GUI).
In other places, Windows 95 announced the change of the company of a 16 -bit architecture used in Windows 3.1 to 32 bits. Once again, this offered marked performance benefits for users, particularly in areas such as random access memory (RAM).
For individual users, Windows 95 greatly improved the quality of life, introducing new key features that still remain to this day.
New bright toys for Microsoft stores
Among the new larger features for the operating system was the introduction of the start menu and the taskbar.
The company spent millions of dollars in a global marketing campaign with “Start Me Up” of the Rolling Stones to promote the introduction of the function: How can we forget the Windows 95 launch event with the song in the background?
The taskbar was also a novel idea for a Windows operating system, and in the wider consumption PC market did not have a real counterpart. Giving users the ability to find and open applications from a unique point of contact was a game change for many.
Better yet, the operating system also allowed users to monitor the applications they were executing, helping to order their system and prioritize certain computing intensive tasks.
Even simple changes in Windows 95 caught it with users, such as the ability to give files and folders 255 characters. That sounds absurd today, but in the previous operating system ‘this had proven to be a great conflict point for many.
User profiles were also added, giving several people the ability to use their own unique configuration in a single device, a real change of play for families.
Before your time
Now we are all well accepted for cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox, ICloud, Google Drive and OneDrive: they are part of the carpentry for users in consumer and companies markets.
Windows 95 was ahead of his time in this regard with the introduction of ‘briefcase’.
This allowed users to save and synchronize files, which means that they would not lose those vital documents or materials and could keep them at hand for when he returned home or worked outside the office.
In particular, the briefcase hung for a long time, since the feature was still available on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, in fact it was not until Windows 8 that was officially in disuse.
