by: Paul Horowitz
Windows 95 was made widely available to the general public 30 years ago this week, on August 24, 1995. 30 years! It might not seem too thrilling today, but Windows 95 was a pretty big deal back in the day, being the first half-decent (ie: Mac-like) GUI to arrive on PC and a huge leap in usability from Windows 3.11. If you lived anywhere near a beige box PC in the mid-90s, you probably remember either running Windows 95 yourself or perhaps on a friends or colleagues computer. You got the Start menu, multitasking, a taskbar, and a much more user friendly interface that borrowed quite a bit from the Mac. Sure it might have crashed and given you a not entirely infrequent BSOD, but it was all part of the charm.
You might even remember when Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, and co, were dancing around on stage to the Rolling Stone’s song “Start Me Up” during the initial Windows 95 launch.
