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  • XtoFxtof@shelter.moe
    Jun 19, 2026, 4:28 PM

    In the process of writing an article about the technical aspects of Windows 95, I stumbled upon a YouTube video called "Why everyone loved Windows 95: 30 years later".

    But wait a minute. In my geek environment of the mid-90s, not everyone loved Win95. Quite the opposite actually 😅

    What was your personal experience with this OS?

    Personally, I really liked it from day one. But I had the luck to have an extremely beefy setup for the time (P90 / 32GiB RAM), did not do anything heavy on Windows, an went back to DOS to play games 🙂

    #retrocomputing #OS #pc

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Replies

  • XtoFxtof@shelter.moe
    Jun 19, 2026, 4:34 PM

    I guess that many people had a bad experience in the first months, because a common PC configuration was barely enough to run it properly. Most people still had 486 machines with 8 or even 4 MiB memory.
    Plus, there were a lot of new instable drivers that were still not "battle tested".

    I think that we could agree that when OSR2 was released more than one year later, the situation was better for everyone.

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  • Jan Betajanbeta@chaos.social
    Jun 19, 2026, 4:40 PM

    @xtof I hated it, mostly because I switched from the Amiga. Windows had a lot of unnecessary bloatware and seemed overly complicated. It also crashed a lot for no apparent reason. And you had to switch to DOS for games anyway. It felt like a downgrade from the Amiga OS to me, despite the higher resolution and far more computing power (I had a Pentium system, too). The Amiga didn’t have DOOM though. And Day of the Tentacle. 😅

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  • cybervegancybervegan@autistics.life
    Jun 19, 2026, 7:59 PM

    @xtof I was a computer techie in a UK university at the time. We had been using windows 3.11 for workgroups on all our PCs. Head of department told us we should upgrade to W95 when it came out and we had to break it to her that the existing 100 or so computers in the labs and 50 or so on staff's desks wouldn't be able to run it without at least a memory upgrade, but many didn't have a good enough CPU either. We got funding for upgrades (mainly new PCs) and rolled it all out over about a year. There were problems getting the computers onto the Novell Netware servers; there were problems with vital software that wouldn't run on W95, especially stuff that was DOS-based, that had worked under W3.11, but wouldn't work on the buggy not-quite-dos-5 that underpinned W95; then there was the constant battle to keep things set up nicely - tricks we used with W3.11 wouldn't work with W95; Fix packs that were supposed to sort out problems we were having either didn't work, or broke other stuff. Core software that courses were written around wouldn't work properly - I remember problems with : WordPerfect5; Topspeed Modula-2; Smalltalk; Quattro Pro; Visual Basic! - things like crashes or lost functionality. Lecturers and staff also resisted having their computers upgraded - some even moving over to Linux to avoid it. It was wild, and I was glad to leave in 1998, though I ended up supporting WinNT4 instead, which was another story entirely.

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  • XtoFxtof@shelter.moe
    Jun 19, 2026, 8:02 PM

    @cybervegan Very interesting to read the opinion of someone who experienced it as a professional back in the days. Thanks!
    I guess you did not vote "I loved it" 🙂

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  • cybervegancybervegan@autistics.life
    Jun 19, 2026, 8:07 PM

    @xtof I also should mention the inevitable tech support for friends who had it... kept me busy outside of office hours, too. Gamers who got new computers, and then couldn't run their old games; people who tried to install it on their existing computer and couldn't get the CDROM drive working to get it installed; crashes due to failed software installed, and of course, viruses...

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