The day of August 24, 1995 was marked by the official presentation of the legendary Windows 95, thanks to which operating systems with a graphical user shell went to the masses, and Microsoft gained wide popularity. After 25 years, let's try to figure out why Windows won the hearts of billions of users around the world.
One of the most important features of Windows 95 was that the operating system made it possible to use a computer without having to interact with the command line. Unlike its predecessor, Windows 3.11, the new OS was loaded directly into the graphical interface, despite the fact that the same DOS kernel was hiding under the hood, albeit significantly improved. Recall that prior to Windows 95, users had to buy MS-DOS and Windows separately and then install a shell on top of the OS. "Ninety-fifth" combined the graphical interface and the OS itself into one complete product. In addition, for most users, the upgrade was completely painless, since Windows 95 offered backward compatibility with all software written for DOS.
On the other hand, due to the use of the DOS kernel, Windows 95 suffered from nasty crashes, often related to memory management conflicts, which Windows NT lacked. However, the popularization of NT-systems among ordinary users began only five years later, with the release of Windows 2000, and the full transition was completed a year later, with the release of the legendary Windows XP.
Among other things, Windows 95 first introduced elements such as the Start menu and the taskbar, which are now hard to imagine working without. Microsoft positioned Start as a key element of the system, an easy way to get started with a PC, even for an unprepared user. And for the first time, the taskbar provided users with a convenient way to manage programs open in several different windows, something that at that time could not be boasted by any of the popular operating systems.
Among other important innovations in Windows 95, it is worth noting the appearance of the Explorer file manager (Explorer), which compares favorably with what could be seen in previous versions of operating systems, where file and application management was divided into different programs, and was very similar in functionality to the analog from Mac OS. There were also right-click context menus, file shortcuts, trash, device manager, system-wide search, built-in support for Win32 and DirectX applications, which allowed you to play in full screen mode.
Windows 95 did not originally include a web browser, which had to be installed separately. In December 1995, Windows 95 included the legendary Internet Explorer, originally called the Internet. By the way, this so outraged the developers of third-party browsers that in 1998 Microsoft became a defendant in a major antitrust hearing.
In addition, the launch of Windows 95 was accompanied by the most expensive advertising campaign at the time. Its cost was about $300 million. The OS was advertised everywhere: in newspapers, magazines, radio, television and billboards.
The effect was impressive. Microsoft sold one million copies of Windows 95 in its first week. The total number of sold copies of the system was about 40 million in the first year. Windows 95 has become a truly remarkable product in the operating system market, and many of the features and functions introduced with it 25 years ago are still alive in the current Windows 10.
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Source: 3dnews.ru