We’ve had something of an anniversary of late, and it’s one that will no doubt elicit a variety of reactions from our community. It’s now 25 years ago that Windows 95 was launched, the operating system that gave the majority of 1990s PC users their first taste of a desktop-based GUI and a 32-bit operating system.
To the strains of the Rolling Stones’ Start me up, Microsoft execs including Bill Gates himself jubilantly danced on stage at the launch of what was probably to become the company’s defining product, perhaps oblivious to the line “You make a grown man cry” which maybe unwittingly strayed close to the user experience when faced with some of the software’s shortcomings.
Its security may seem laughable by the standards of today and the uneasy marriage of 16-bit DOS underpinning a 32-bit Windows operating system was clunky even in its heyday, but perhaps now is the best time to evaluate it unclouded by technical prejudice. What can we see of Windows 95 in the operating systems we use today, and thus from that can we ask the question: What did Windows 95 get right?
For Most People, This Was Where It All Started
A test of the legacy of Windows 95’s desktop comes in how intuitive it still is for users of a 2020-era GUI OS.
Windows 95 was by no means the first operating system to use a desktop based GUI. While earlier Windows GUIs had been more akin to graphical launchers there had been a succession of other GUI-based computers since their Xerox PARC ancestor, so Macintosh and Amiga owners among other ..
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