Windows 95 released August 24, 1995

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , Windows August 24, 2026 August 24, 2026 2 Comments It was on August 24, 1995 that Windows 95 was released, amidst much anticipation. It was the most widely anticipated Windows release of all time, and the runner up really isn’t close. The idea of people lining up for blocks for a Microsoft product sounds like a bit of a joke today, and the more time goes on, the bigger of a joke it becomes. But I’m serious that in 1995 it happened. Why Windows 95 was a big deal The Windows 95 upgrade cost $79, but customers often found getting it to run well required some upgrades to go with it. Windows 95 promised to be the biggest leap Windows users had experienced to date. Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.0 before it were both runaway successes, but they had limits. They could multitask, but it wasn’t modern pre-emptive multitasking. Instead, the applications cooperated rather than the operating system being able to hand out resources. This meant a poorly behaved program could do a lot more to gum up the works in 1994 than it can do today, since the operating system just had to trust all of the programs to cooperate fairly. Windows 3.x also didn’t scale all that well. The optimal processor for Windows 3.1 is a 486 . Brand doesn’t matter much. And the optimal speed is right around 100 MHz. Somewhere around that point, it hits the wall. Switching from a 100 MHz 486 to a 100 MHz Pentium doesn’t yield much of a speed increase for mos…