Why the World Went Nuts for Windows 95 | Nostalgia Nerd

[@CasioMaker]

I miss those days. Computers seemed more mysterious and interesting as tools for fun and learning.

[@szilardfineascovasa6144]

True!

[@chewycooking9013]

They still can be!

[@shanehebert396]

I am sort of the opposite... they were more easy to learn all the details about them and do neat things. Also, computers of different brands were actually different. You had C64 with sprites, SID, etc. and you had Atari 8-bit with player-missile graphics and some sound and you had Apple 2s which were bailing wire and duct tape ;) People/fans could *cough* discuss *cough* their favorite platform with respect to differences of others, but in any case, it was possible to know all about the thing. As opposed to today, there are basically two platforms... Linux/Unix and Windows. Hardware, other than just performance characteristics, is practically generic.

[@Hybridknfgrowchannel]

Big time! The greatest tech era man it was so cool to experience that it is not even anything like that anymore the competition between companies was alao something that really made it special everyone picked a side and you died on that hill with them! 😂😂😂

[@Henk14789]

I mean, tone down the 80's cocaine factor and most tech presentations nowadays aren't that different.

[@etgripper]

I got home from school one day and our PC had Win 3.1 upgraded to 95 and my dad installed a CDROM drive. I remember not liking it at first. But what amazes me is my parents were able to get all that done back then, but now they call to reset the router or to plug in an HDMI cable.

[@Bertie_Ahern]

This slow decline in ability with technology is something I've noticed in myself as I'm getting older. So I can sympathise with them.

[@joshm7769]

They call you because they love you.

[@illhaveawtrplz]

Same thing happened to my dad. He has an associates degree in IT, wired our house for Ethernet and updated it regularly, runs a NAS and home server from an old dell workstation to all the computers in the house, but he can’t understand Google Drive. He complains about the crappy nav system on his new SUV, but won’t use Android Auto despite being shown how multiple times.

[@privateagent]

​@@joshm7769 this

[@SensitivityGames]

​@@illhaveawtrplzto be fair. Old tech was more simple. These days is totally difrent simple then their simple. Thier simple was oh coding is 0 and 1. Us is ih coding is asking the already coded program a what if question that translates that question to 0's and 1's. I found this out when i had to use a dis based system at work it literally fks with your mind cause its totaly difrent in some way.

[@madgebishop5409]

i remember being at secondary school and the head teacher literally had a special assembly to talk about windows 95...the most bizarre moment of my school life

[@maxwellbruce4747]

You still remember it and you are using a computer to type that . Teacher done job well .

[@ash36230]

I remember being in primary school and still using RiscOS at that time

[@volvo09]

They gave a presentation about win95? Was it possible that the schools computer lab got upgraded and they wanted to get all the kids a bit more familiar?

[@OldMan_PJ]

I can almost guarantee that was the result of Microsoft marketing sending out educational materials to schools about the launch rather than spontaneous enthusiasm.

[@jimbotron70]

​@@OldMan_PJNot only educational materials 😏

[@Inverse_Midas]

Steve Ballmer was a cross between an angry Willy wonka, and a WWF wrestler doing a promo to camera.

[@picklerick814]

so he was a triangle

[@DustinRodriguez1_0]

And then when he took over Microsoft he decided the nerds had had too much fun, so he implemented a caveman-brain bold new internal strategy: bringing competition to the inside of the company. He very nearly destroyed the company, and made it one of the most toxic and abusive companies in the industry. Employees wouldn't help each other because every employee was rated by performance metrics in near-realtime and if you spent time helping someone else, it lowered your rank and boosted the person you helped. The different teams also competed against each other, so teams wouldn't talk to each other, sabotaging each other, etc. He's one of the dumbest, most inept human beings on the planet who couldn't even sit back and let the golden goose just keep laying eggs.

[@SyntheToonz]

People were going nuts, because win95 made PCs finally look and multitask almost like Amigas.

[@cs8712]

win95 = amigas win11 = amogus

[@Longlius]

Amigas didn't even have memory protection bruh. Win9x absolutely smoked Amigas in terms of multitasking.

[@HexyTech]

Windows 95 was a lot like Amiga Workbench!

[@Psy500]

@@Longlius It worked on the honor system. You request memory from the kernel, the kernel would give you a memory address that is free but the kernel had no way to jump in or block off memory space of other tasks. Yet since the Amiga architecture was far more strait forward and Commodore's documentation was good enough, it was used for professional multitasking workloads like being using as a telopper at TV stations where it would both handle the animation and superimposing of the video signal at the same time.

[@neumi569]

Well, OS/2 already had pre-emptive multitasking at the time, being on a higher level than Amigas version. Pre-emptive multitasking did exist before the Amiga already, mostly used on servers. But it took a lot of memory, the Amiga programmers were able to do it with just 200K, a lot less than it was usually the case in 1985 (a common guideline was that it would take around 4MB). That's what made it so special. @Longlius since they had 10 years for development after the Amiga ... of course. If they still would be behind the Amiga, that would have been a crying shame.

[@kayonesoft]

I miss the 90s. Everything felt simpler and there was still hope and optimism.

[@jamesdecross1035]

Yet, 1992 was as big an economic crash as 1972.

[@privateagent]

I miss the 90s too.

[@saintrocketIX]

6:41 Steve Ballmer doing what he does best: going insane.

[@pokehybridtrainer]

This is the first time I have seen that clip that wasn't a YTP for years. Dang.

[@TheGMOGamer]

@@pokehybridtrainer REVERSI REVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSIREVERSI

[@Vitosi4ek1]

Bears mentioning that this isn't *actually* a real ad that aired on TV, but a parody shot exclusively for internal Microsoft and marketing partner consumption. Michael MJD has a great video about it. The dead giveaway is the last line: "available everywhere except in Nebraska" - a relic of a very brief period where you couldn't call a national toll-free number within the state the line was established in and that was already way outdated at the time the ad was produced.

[@cloudbloom]

Cocaine is a hell of a drug

[@jimbotron70]

Damn, he looks like those weird used cars salesmen on small local TVs...

[@alasdairrr]

Watching Balmer and Gates dancing away always makes me laugh

[@ecu4321]

Its not related to the win95 launch. It was an internal video for their tean building motivational program

[@Spacemutiny]

The best

[@Nostalgianerd]

It's a beautiful thing

[@dansamarco1610]

Steve Ballmer is such a sleazy salesperson, if he were a character in a book he'd be derided for being unrealistically insane.

[@qubex]

I remember queuing for the release at midnight in August 1995. I was fourteen years old and had been driven into a frenzy of anticipation by constant press coverage and hype. I had even read a whole book published by Microsoft on what improvements to expect with Windows 95… I remember that the screenshots still featured earlier-beta diamond-shaped radio buttons in the interface rather than the circular ones we eventually got. My 486DX2-66 with 8MB of RAM was really not up to the task of running it smoothly when it was released though and so my experience was frustrating until I eventually was given a Cyrix 586-based laptop about a year later. I really miss those times.

[@alfmerck6262]

Never feel like you "miss" the past - you were there, and it happened. Much like when a band releases a worse version of their hit record (e.g., Dire Straights' On Every Street was a shit version of Money for Nothing), there is no point repeating what once was great. Enjoy the greatness you remember, but now create new greatness.....there is no going back.

[@AmigaA-or2hj]

Anyone remember BeOS?

[@brucedavis1803]

Pepperidge Farm remembers!

[@ecu4321]

@@AmigaA-or2hj it came in later after win95 launched. Around '96?

[@AmigaA-or2hj]

Thereabouts. Yes.

[@Wzrd100]

How about OS/2?

[@mbirth]

@@Wzrd100 OS/2 is somehow mostly kept around for older ATMs, it seems. Changed hands and was renamed eComStation and nowadays it's being sold as Arca OS. But I don't know if anyone would willingly pay $140 for it.

[@gvetech]

Great video. I was a teen when Windows 95 came out and I remember the excitement!

[@s81n]

I was obsessed with this launch. I was a teen at the time with zero access to a computer. Our libraries didn’t have them, my school didn’t have them, my parents wouldn’t buy one, and my only friends with computers had parents who didn’t ket anyone but family touch them. I would watch CNet tv and read computer magazines to learn about them. CNET had coverage of the launch and it was like being at a big tech party. Back then computers still had an air of mystery. The internet was still new and exciting and computers just kept being capable of more and more things. Seeing all the enhancements of windows 95 was like magic.

[@therealyogibear2k225]

Here's the thing. I am 54 so was 24/25 when Windows 95 launched and I didn't have a clue! I was more into the Amiga back then and didn't get a pc until about 1998. This Windows 95 hype completely passed me by. In fact, (off topic,) even the PS 2 launch completely passed me by as I did not get a PS 2 until 2017. So, maybe I am not so much of a geek/nerd as I think I am!

[@sndestroy]

I think it may be a regional thing. I'm from Latin America, and Commodore saw VERY limited success here... it was Ataris, Speccy clones and PC compatibles all the way. I'm almost 40 and never seen a C64 or Amiga (nor get their hype) in my entire life 🤷🏻‍♂️ but, everyone and their mothers used, or at least knew, about Win95.

[@lapielazoolie]

I don’t get how the most successful home console of all time could’ve fell under your radar, how were you watching DVDs back in the early ‘00s when they were first being widely adopted?

[@therealyogibear2k225]

@lapielazoolie I wasn't watching dvds back then. Heck I didn't get a dvd burner until about 2006 and that was one for my pc at the time. DVDs themselves didn't interest me much. I was a lot more interested in getting a burner to burn my data to DVD's not for watching movies. I have only watched about 15 films in my life so far. Same with blu ray. I got a blu ray burner in about 2015 for the same reason as the dvd burner. I have never owned a commercial blu ray disk, ever. Just blanks. Now I use SSD and NVME for storage. Thank you for the reply.

[@GigAHerZ64]

8:22 Windows 95 was the first Windows with pre-emptive multitasking. Previous versions were using co-operative multitasking. I wish to have Windows 3.x with pre-emptive multitasking... It would be very interesting experience.

[@Scoth42]

I suspect the confusion is because Windows/386 and Win3.x in Enhanced Mode does preemptively multitask MS-DOS sessions and MS-DOS sessions with the entire Windows subsystem, it's just it's only cooperative multitasking within the Windows subsystem which is all anyone really cared about. I'd imagine there weren't all that many people who really did a lot of hardcore MS-DOS multitasking.

[@SparkerR1987]

Back in the day "Windows 98/ME" You used to be able to change explorer.exe with the manager used in Windows 3.1. This replaced the Windows 98/ME desktop to Windows 3.1 desktop while keeping all of the underlying kernel and software components. It was very interesting indeed. From a gaming perspective, The window manager was less resource intensive than the default Windows 98/ME interface which is why I used it. I ended up replacing it with a lightweight window manager that felt more like Windows though.

[@der.Schtefan]

Me dying in school for the 95 seconds (exact) it took Netscape to start, before you could alt/tab back to AutoCAD

[@nickwallette6201]

@@Scoth42 When I finally had enough RAM in my 486SX to run Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode, I used the MS-DOS multitasking to run MOD players. It mostly kinda worked. Things definitely improved when I downloaded MOD4Win from a BBS.

[@eppinizer]

Hey, the algorithm finally put one of your new videos in my feed! Usually I don't even see them in my subscriptions list.

[@pcpanikMusik]

One of Microsoft's strategy was „always tell the customers, that Microsoft would develop something better, then the competition has just released. Just wait a little and we will present you the same, but better.“ And ironically it worked well for them.

[@VELVETPERSON]

I am from Russia and in 2000 I was sure that only Windows existed and that it came with all computers that existed. Later I found out that in 95% of cases it was a pirated version.

[@chuckl7713]

Imagine getting your first computer and all you have is a blinking cursor. Typing all sorts of random stuff and not getting a thing back until you typed that magic word, "Help". This was the beginning of your PC journey in the early 90s.

[@volvo09]

You had to somewhat know how to use them anyways, or you would buy one from a local PC shop... They would install what you wanted, configure it, and might give you a menu to launch apps like WordPerfect so you could type and print.

[@chuckl7713]

@@volvo09 Yeah for a lot sure. Maybe most, but some of us just had our dad bring one home second hand.

[@AmigaA-or2hj]

I was still using Amiga Workbenches 1.3 and 3.0.😊

[@AndrewLittleboy1]

Still am! 😊

[@FireFoxOmicron]

First OS I ever remember My Father using was Windows 3.1. But the one that made a lasting Impression on Me and first I actually used Myself was Windows 95 when I was 3 years old. From the Startup Sound to the 3D Maze Screensaver. My Fathere even had the Windows 95 Plus! Features later Installed which added so much more to It.

[@privateagent]

One of my grips was throwing out the boxes of windows 95 and windows 95 Plus! Those were the days..

[@FireFoxOmicron]

@@privateagent I still have Mine as well as Windows 98! As well as the Windows 3.1 Floppy Disks, Lol.

[@caseytwill]

My roommate and I worked nights, so we got off work at 4am, drove to Incredible Universe and got in line for the Win 95 release. Once purchased, drove home with box in hand and installed it on both our computers in the living room. We only had one cd-rom between us at the time, so after we were finished with the first Win95 installation, we had to move it over to the 2nd computer to install Win95 on that machine. Good times!

[@MKnife]

I worked at Microsoft Sweden in PSS (Product Support Services) starting January 31st of 1995, so I was there during the late Chicago beta and at the Win95 launch event in Stockholm Globen. I still have the launch event shirt (it doesn't fit anymore). And I took about 65 support calls the day after launch. Having preciously worked at IBM OS/2 support from June 1992 to early 1995, MS was a very different world. I stayed at MS until 2010. Things sure have changed in 30 years, but the hype machine seems to still run strong with the cloudy AI:s and whatnot.

[@kilotangosierra]

win95 is still my favourite OS. it was absolute magic to have a PC back then

[@privateagent]

Magical indeed

[@HisVirusness]

The first time I ever saw Windows 95 was at a Best Buy, on one of their demo computers. I was both amazed and very intimidated. It wouldn't be for another four years until it was a fixture in my family's living room. I miss when Windows wasn't so trash.

[@mascot4950]

Yeah. I don't know what Microsoft were thinking. We used to love how our machines would bluescreen if we as much as sneezed in its presence. Instead they made the stupid thing rock solid so we only really have to reboot when they release the monthly patch pack. It sucks now.

[@UltraNyan]

I mean calling windows 95 to ME anywhere stable would be insane, you could say these systems were maybe simple although I would even argue against that because the ui was quite cumbersome and the functionality of the OS very limited compared even to linux of that time. Maybe windows XP and 7 was the peak. And if you look past the absurd system requirements of windows 11, its a modern and secure OS. Generally as an end user you don't have to worry as much about security as you had to worry back in the day.

[@nickwallette6201]

Nobody was talking about stability. Many of us were running Windows 95 on a 486 with VLB and something like 4MB of RAM. Stability wasn't on the menu. It's just that ... Windows 95 was actually better than the OS you were using before it. It wasn't spying on you. It wasn't advertising more crap at you. It didn't need to be "activated" to use it. It didn't fight you when you changed the default program to handle some file type or link.

[@mascot4950]

​@@nickwallette6201 Considering two out of the three comments in the thread at the time you responded mentioned stability, that's objectively incorrect.

[@Mr.Atari2600]

Microsoft today forgot what Windows was suppose to be... *FUN!!!*

[@slightlyevolved]

7:00 I don't think I ever realized that from day one Ballmer's default status was WOOOOOOOOOO.

[@johnparker007]

Cries in Amiga Workbench.

[@markenetube]

Two videos in a week. You are spoiling us Mr Nerd

[@Nostalgianerd]

They're like buses

[@KarrierBag]

My first 'pc' was a Tatung Einstein in mid to late 80's, a dot matrix printer and a tape player..... oh times have changed.

[@sonic2000gr]

I installed Windows 95 upgrade the next day it was released, from the upgrade diskettes in a couple of different system. Compared to Win 3.11 it was really impressive but also quite hard on CPU, RAM and disk. I consider 95 a major factor in getting rapid PC hardware advancements.

[@pv2]

22:10 there seems to be some kind of goof with the captions - the bit about not worrying about backwards compatibility on NT just doesn't show up, skips straight to plug & play

[@davekendall5273]

I remember my uncle buying Windows 95 at a computer show and proudly showing off the box full of floppy disks. For some reason he couldn't get it to install on his PC, even though I'm pretty sure it was a 486 (it ran Doom pretty well). He ultimately upgraded to Windows 95 by buying a shiny new Pentium PC with a CD-ROM drive and W95 preinstalled.

[@privateagent]

I believe the basic installation was around twelve 3.5" floppy disks 💾

[@smugshrug]

Technology was changing so quickly, and a lot of us here were growing up with it, watching it happen. Now, computers are so mundane, they are part of our lives and we're used to it. I don't know if we'll ever experience a phenomenon like that again.

[@petrihaikonen2528]

I didn't use 95 that much, but I used 98 SE on my computers for a long time and I loved it. I agree that 95 was quite revolutionary on the PC market. It was the first MS operating system that used graphical interface for about everything. There generally was no need to go to DOS unless you wanted to play DOS games.

[@kurtwinter4422]

98SE was the least crappy version.

[@AlanCanon2222]

Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and Trumpet Winsock were all my old dad ever needed. We had t' assemble it ourselves from source printed in a rolled up newspaper in t' lake.

[@toseltreps1101]

why are you writing ret'arded like that

[@privateagent]

My first foray on the Internet was that exact setup in Feb. 1994 . Before I found mIRC I was using Westwood studios built-in chat app for the great game Command and Conquer. As soon as I installed mIRC all hell break lose as I'd pull all-nighters in my high school years. What a time it was to be alive, no DEI, no wokism... just joy and hope

[@Zaro2008]

Back then the tech world was full of innovation and creativity, now it's just scams and ol products being made worse 😥

[@roderickcortez138]

I miss when the people in tech support actually knew computers. Now it's all just people overseas reading from a script.

[@BigCar2]

I'd just started working for Microsoft in Redmond at the time, and it was wild there as well. Developers running through the hallways shooting nerf guns when they'd announced the software was ready to ship (RTM - release to manufacture). Big event on the soccer fields in the middle of the Microsoft campus.

That Hungarian Win95 installation at 34:57 caught me off guard :)

[@Nostalgianerd]

Me too

​@@Nostalgianerd hehe. Did i miss something? Was this an eBay purchase of some sort? :)

[@Line49Design]

I am glad that you characterized the Gary Kildall reference fairly and summarized neatly what actually happened. So many "KZbin historians", as you know, slander Gary without really knowing that he was clear headed on his negotiation with IBM, and was not just a flake that was goofing off in a plane. Thanks. ❤

[@Nostalgianerd]

Big fan of Kildall

[@Southsideanglingclub]

the music at the ending was superb - 2nd and fourth chops in the rhythm make a nice preamble

[@stanleythrewbrick]

2:33-2:40 you _really_ couldn't find the MS-DOS logo _without_ the "Pinterest save icon" in the corner??.... lol

[@xaulted1]

The ultimate nerd dance party spectacle that will never again be equaled.

[@mattBLACKpunk]

Honestly I love and miss Steve ballmer. Dude was just 10 years ahead of his time

[@ralfvanbogaert3451]

What are you talking about? He was too dumb to recognize the success of smartphones, and caused Microsoft to miss that extremely lucrative boat entirely.

[@mattBLACKpunk]

@ralfvanbogaert3451 I'm talking about stuff like 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS [...]' and his general unhinged behaviour, not strictly his business decisions

[@cal2127]

idk he was responsible for win 8

[@sodacode]

@@ralfvanbogaert3451 Ballmer did better than what Nadella is doing cannibalizing Windows in ads and spyware.

[@nickwallette6201]

Yes. Unhinged lunatics do make the best CEOs. Right, Tesla?

[@MYNAME_ABC]

Only with the PLUS-Package was WIN95 able to move windows including their content. Otherwise you'd just moved a rectangle and the window was rendered at the new position after that. Those were the times. Those were THE 90s!!!!👍👍👍 😂

[@kz1000ps]

As a kid, my family got our first computer in September 1995, so right in time for the Windows 95 and AOL boom of the late '90s. I used a decent amount of 3.0/3.1/DOS in school so I knew where things were coming from but Windows 95 felt like home from day 1. Throw in a little Warcraft and a lot of MS Paint and my late '90s computing was T U B U L A R !

[@GaRbAllZ]

I remember 95 well.... There were thousands of RC copies of Chicago people were using. Really easy to find a pirate copy back then. I got on the internet in 94 with a 28.8 modem and Win 3.11 for WG was terrible implement the network. You had to setup the TCP/IP SLIP connection at boot and hope it didn't crash. NO MULTITASKING on the NET with 3.11 WG, if you were DL files or on a BBS/MUD, then tabbed to a different program, even file explorer, the modem connection would drop. WIN 95 fixed this issue.

[@nickwallette6201]

Uhm... the modem maintained the connection itself, in hardware. (At least until WinModems became a thing, many years later.) All the software did was read bytes out of the FIFO. If you waited too long, you might've missed one or more, once the buffer got full and overflowed. (Assuming you weren't using flow control.) But that just cost you a TCP retransmit, which wasn't terribly uncommon in the modem days anyway.

[@GaRbAllZ]

@@nickwallette6201 I think is was the TCP stack back then couldn't handle multitasking very well DOS was clumsy with windows

[@Towik]

at 06:41 for some reason I imagined that Jim Carrey should be the one doing this act... 🤣

[@billramsay7351]

Windows 95 was huge, anyone who'd had to struggle with batch files to free up enough memory to get a game to run, or with irq and dma settings to get hardware to work will tell you just how much easier things became with Win 95. It obviously had teething issues but it was a game changer

[@privateagent]

Windows 95 was very unstable until Windows 98 Second edition. But it was impressive indeed

[@chris_is_here_oh_no]

Fantastic documentary! Very well covered.

[@OldMan_PJ]

Windows 95 began the mantra of wait for the first service pack.

[@HommerThadeu]

7:15 Steve Ballmer has so much energy he recharged my phone while announcing the Windows.

[@Thezuule1]

I remember the first time I used a Windows 95 PC and it didn't seem to have an obvious command prompt. I dabbled with Linux and ran Windows 3.1 on my machine so the idea that the GUI was a command I executed was just sort of second nature. The idea that we weren't supposed to do things in the terminal at all, and the entire OS was the GUI itself, was a massive shift in the way we did things.

[@andywest5773]

I was about 18 when Windows 95 came out, and I remember people freaking out about it. I also remember seeing it for the first time and thinking, "I don't get it. It's basically the same as Windows 3.1".

[@nenharma82]

I was like 13 and I was so hyped for that Start button, not even kidding.

[@pushinguproses]

I’m just here to see Steve Ballmer absolutely lose his mind. “Give it up for MEEEEEEEEEEE”

[@VikingTeddy]

Can't believe you went with Bond for the Dos intro, when Maxwell Smart is right there in the name. Get Smart!

[@Nostalgianerd]

It was the correct choice and I stand by it

[@VikingTeddy]

@Nostalgianerd That's the spirit! Oh, and a very fascinating video btw. Didn't expect an os of all things to bring out such nostalgia. As a kid I never understood how a text prompt could be so daunting to some people. It was weird being considered a "computer expert" for having memorized a few commands :). But we've lived with easy intergaces for so long now, that I felt like running away scared, like a primitive many from fire, when I came upon a wild linux text prompt a while back. Guis really did change things. Really good video, thnx 😊

[@joncarter3761]

95 I think was the first Microsoft OS that really went all in on multimedia (3.1 had mm extensions but 95 came with it as standard) which is why it was so amazing at the time, especially with the MMX Pentiums that were commonly used by OEMs and many graphics cards were coming with hardware MPEG decoding. If you add to it the drop in pricing for PCs, components and Internet connections it was a perfect storm to put a computer in practically every home!

[@esr1412]

The Ant In My Eyes Johnson ad from Rick and Morty had the same energy as That Windows ad 🤣

[@ManosS40]

I remember installing Win95 at my Am486/100MHz back then. It was a completely new world, compared to the 3.11/6.22 combo I was using at that time. Well, 30 years have passed since then... Time goes by! Nice video mate!

[@autingo6583]

3:05 never owned one, but instantly recognize the amstrad pc because of the distinctive font. nice. btw. i'm very happy about the increased frequency of videos lately. :-D but also take your time and don't run into burnout again. :-)

[@RetroSegaDev]

😢*chefs kiss* 👌 Great video. I have a lot of good memories of the Windows 95 era.

[@icywiener5421]

Oh dude! You saved my next morning! Thank you! Make more and longer!

[@onatgz]

dear mr. nerd, thx for the video. best regards,

[@fyisic]

I would like to add that during the Dos era there was menu software using ascii that launched various software, very similar to how setups in some games and other software looked. This made it a bit more user friendly over just giving you a prompt. And someone that could help a company setup that could probably make some money. Cant say how common it was, but my dad had it at his company.

[@NoPegs]

Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!!!

[@Frostwize]

Woooo a Nostalgia Nerd Video, the highlight of the month! (so far the year)

[@1Surinamer]

From the home computers to the first PCs and Windows 95, what a time to be alive. Using the computer in the 90s was like magic to me. The only thing I regret is not doing anything with my computer knowledge. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been rich.

[@ecu4321]

Just want to state that the dancing meme was not a part of the win95 launch. It started a meme that became wrongly associated with the launch.

[@Nostalgianerd]

This is a useful comment, for those who don't watch the entire video

[@SMlFFY85]

@@Nostalgianerd Sick burn

[@tyrkukulkan]

@@Nostalgianerd Who wouldn't watch the whole video? Insanity!

[@ytsm]

You still have time to delete, bro.

[@whitebeartigtig]

I'm not as old as the majority of people who follow this channel, but I sure as hell do have an interest in retro tech. My Windows 95 Upgrade copy has a lovely spot on my shelf. Oh did I mention that it is the version that came on floppies. Haven't installed it on anything yet because I don't have any hardware old enough to do so just yet. Working on that though. The tech back then was incredibly cool, the fact that Win95 listed 4MB RAM as a minimum requirement is incredible in itself. Just a testament to how optimization was so important back then. The fact that people went absolutely mad for an OS back then too, just something we don't get anymore, especially on the windows side. Windows just runs horribly even on the best hardware now. The 9x UI was way ahead of its time, I mean, we're still using it now in a way, even 30 years later. Incredible.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

To be fair, MS has quite a track record of severely underestimating the minimum hardware requirements and that 4MB for Windows 95 was one of those instances. Yes, technically you _could_ get it to boot with just 4 MB of RAM but it wouldn't have been a pleasant experience AT ALL and you probably couldn't do much with it anyway even if you made it to the desktop. Windows 95 was borderline unusable with anything less than 8 MB of RAM, which may not sound like much today but it was expensive AF back in those days and not everybody was ready to shell out the dough to upgrade their systems like that at the time.

[@jonjohnson2844]

Blokes in the pub who had literally just come from working down the coal mine were talking about it, crazy times.

[@exodous02]

We went from a C64 to windows 95 at my house. It was a huge jump. Soon after that we go the net and that was my pree-teen years. The interface is so ingrained into my brain I use Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop because it is a heck of a lot closer to windows 95 than anything that microsoft makes.

[@entheo302]

Living up to your channel name. I’m not even a big computer person but watching this is giving me the feels as I recall how clunky pcs were in the late 80s. Wish there was a website that would simulate these old operating systems for nostalgia’s sake

[@Nostalgianerd]

Try pcjs.org

[@Garagezaz]

I remember upgrading my desktop to 95 and installing a CDROM Drive at the same time. My world opened up overnight.

[@renevalleramos994]

7:15 that steve ballmer... Whoever knew he would end Nokia's career..

[@Lloyd-Franklin]

I remember when Windows 95 was shown off and I remember reports claiming people were upset over the Start Menu and they wanted it gone.

[@jonasga]

We using the massively enshittefied version of that still. Win 95 is the first time the consumer UI looked like it does today. It has changed in some visual ways, but largely the Win 95 is the consumer UI format that stuck long term. They tried to make Win 8 not look like Win 95 and the Microsoft forum burned down. This is how people just wanted to compute.

[@hardwire666too]

It's crazy how hyped Windows once was, and now if given the choice between my foot and Windows 11 I'm buying a prosthetic.

[@xandercruz900]

It really pulled PCs from "passable" with Win 3.11 (basically a shell for DOS), to an actual polished device that you can use casually and be able to actually get use and entertainment out of it because all of the cool new stuff, like "multimedia" and the internet worked easier. Obviously tons of stuff still didnt work, but it FELT good to use. I got a copy for my 16th birthday, and just the desktop themes alone kept me occupied.

[@MarcinWiesniakQuantum]

I remember both getting a Win95 demo diskette (which was pretty useless in the end) and attending a local Win95 premiere in the Opera house in Gdańsk, Poland. This was the first time we've seen a smooth game in a window...

[@Sinn0100]

I was there...oh yes, I remember all of this. I just built my first PC 486DX2@66MHz for homewor....Doom. I was experiencing all the PC games of the era that I missed as a straight console player. I jumped on the Win 95 hype train, and man, was that a bad idea. My poor 486 went from a snappy machine to a bogged down pig. Needless to say I reverted it back to Win 3.11 and left it alone. My dad, on the other hand, picked up a Pentium Pro box, and that ran Win 95 like a top. What a neat thing to be alive for and able to appreciate it. The launch of Win 98 was also cool. Addendum- Who here remembers Windows ME? Yuck.

[@Bertie_Ahern]

I still remember the seemingly endless mainstream TV and newspaper adverts Microsoft paid for in the UK to advertise Win '95. I've never seen an OS advertised like that before or since.

[@Ascania]

Damn! That's some heavy nostalgia there. I remember Windows 95 too and how it was made up mainly of crashes on top of more crashes until Service Pack 2 made it useable.

[@Somelucky]

I think these kinds of events felt larger then because there weren't many people on the Internet and AOL was one of the largest social media platforms at the time. Now the world feels small since we expect to get the latest news push practically instantaneously.

[@pillington1338]

I didn't keep up with computer hype at the time, but upgraded to Windows 95 late in 1995, and it was amazing.

[@neumi569]

OS/2 was awesome for the time, many companies were about to switch and my Pentium was shipped with OS/2 install media. But according to ongoing rumors at the time, MS had a deal with Intel. They would threaten manufacturers not to sell them processors anymore if they didn't bundle their PCs with Windows. This bought them time to finish their own 32 bit environment with MS Office, rather than having people use Staroffice or other solutions.

[@TesseractUnfolded]

Windows 95 was the first piece of software I ever pre-ordered. I think I even still have the scratched-to-hell CD around somewhere.

[@der.Schtefan]

The one killer feature was the slim, always visible taskbar with the start button. That's what makes Win95 so good and having couple of apps open, and switch rapidly, compared to Win3.11. That, preemptive multitasking, 32bit, Win3.11 and DOS compatibility.

[@meowcula]

a little fact often omitted from the story of Apple's 1979 visit to Xerox was the $1M in pre-IPO apple stock that was given in exchange. It was never "stolen" from Xerox, it was purchased. Not only that, the value actually doubled the next year when Apple went public, and would be worth eye bleeding billions today.

[@CarbyGuuGuu]

There’s something about older versions of Windows that felt like a fully functional operating system. Every commercial OS nowadays rely so heavily on AI to the point that it ends up breaking them.

[@ytsm]

I worked on the ad campaign across EMEA for 95 and the amount of money they were spending was wild. Good times!

[@johneygd]

I remember computers becoming more wide spread to the massess since late 1995. I remember how i was looking at those dixons folders wich did show pc’s and laptops with windows 95 on it. Then i heard about the internet and how it became a big thing in 1996, even in the netherlands. However it was 1998 that i first experienced windows 95 and the internet. I was amezed surfing on the internet on the nintendo website, now that was something i did consider to be something cool😁

That thing ballmer does with his hands just drips with excitement

[@javidaderson]

I feel like this could happen again if valve released steam, made it free to install on any device and have Linus host the live stream.

[@Lurch-Bot]

I built my first PC in March, 1995. It was a top of the line 486. Had one of the earliest integrated I/0 boards, with BIOS overclocking. I got an intel DX2-66. But I ran it at 120MHz with a 40MHz FSB. I had EDO RAM, and plenty of it, Diamond Stealth VRAM 4MB, SB 16, CD-ROM. It performed like a P75 in integer math and a P60 in floating point. It was awesome. And the people who say you can't run Quake well on a 486 are full of crap. I was running Windows 95 on it from the start, courtesy of a pirated late beta that became the launch version after extensive testing and validation. I also had DOS 6.22. Windows 95 was not a true OS but a GUI. And 98 was just a GUI also. And both worked fine with DOS 6.22 I didn't have the money for a HDD larger than 2GB, lol. As a gamer, I didn't trust 7.0 because I had heard bad things and never have used it to this day. I used 95 until the end of the decade on my PC, which I later upgraded to a P90 after we upgraded the 'family' PC to a P120MMX in '97. The following year, we added a RIVA TNT and I threw the Matrox Millennium in my PC. Literally the only 2D card that was arguably, slightly better than the Stealth VRAM. We eventually put '98 on the downstairs PC but since I wasn't running my PC online, 98 would have been a completely pointless waste of space and RAM. Don't really use '98 these days because it is pointless for retro games because pretty much all 98 games were also compatible with 95 or 2000/XP. In fact, most '98 games I have run fine in Windows 7 and I do play a lot of them on that OS. I even found a couple in my collection that ran on Windows 10 but that's only gonna happen if it is a game still being sold because it gets patched to run on modern Windows. I really don't like to use XP unless I absolutely have to and the Brothers in Arms series are the only XP games I want to play that will not run on Windows 7. It is only the StarForce and SecuROM XP games that have to run on XP. There were rumours back in the day that Gates actually stole 86-DOS. I have no idea whether they are true but following the divorce and comments made by his ex wife about his relationship with Epstein I pretty much just assume these days someone like that would have stolen it. One thing about Windows 95 a lot of people don't realize is that it was basically useless for gaming. I actually never bought any Windows 95 or 98 games in the '90s. The only thing I used it for was Office and, on the downstairs PC, internet.

[@JustinSable]

I fucking love the delivery of the guy in that DOS commercial, comes off as weird and desperate, feels like a Tim and Eric skit almost, haha

[@davenirtam7965]

I remember this time fondly. Back in 95 I was transitioning from being an Amiga-Kid to earn my living in IT. Absolutely marvellous times, always something new and exciting, and a lot of reinstalling Win95 because it pooped itself 😂

[@Flashy7]

It is funny to see that while we (in Central Europe) were still banging black and white analog rocks together, the western world was already full of totally insane computer ads in TV :) And I am not even speaking about Ballmer.

[@abbiedoobie]

I was pretty young when Win95 launched, and I remember not understanding why our PC (Win95) and my grandma's PC (Win3.1) worked differently. Since the Win3.1 machine happened to have Wolfenstein 3D, it was obviously the superior choice. I was not a very smart child.

[@Psy500]

While 95 was a big deal for the IBM PC market, the Mac was on 7.5 by then and while Commodore was dead Amiga OS 3.1 had came out prior to that. Also while stuck in Japan you had FM Towns proprietary OS along with the Sharp X68000 having its own desktops that copied the Unix desktops that existed at the time. Thus I see Win95 more as catching up with the innovation made on other hardware then itself being innovate.

[@gremfive4246]

I remember waiting on Win95 to be released but OS/2 Warp released 1st so I decided to give it a go. I think I switched over to Win95 about 6-8 months after it released.