I was on the front lines for Win95 tech support. 
No joke. It started my “career” in computers. I remember the ramp up to prepare for the release. I remember meetings about this World Wide Web that was going to revolutionize everything. Netscape was the browser of choice at the time, but Win95 was going to take it all to the next level. I still remember the call centers - one before the release at an off campus MS building in Bellevue, and after at an outsourced company in downtown Seattle.
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I loved 3.11 with the Symantic skinning app that let you customize Every. Single. Thing. It really spoiled me against ever switching to Apple products, but also made upgrading to W95 a sad day. After that, my enthusiasm for new computing ‘efficiency’ dimmed and I’ve spent many years looking for ways to reduce my amount of seat time. I’m also still mad about “ribbons”. 
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Linux makes its it easier on the operating system and kernel developers by not supporting old ABIs very well. Your app doesn’t even run unless you go to great lengths to ensure compatibility (with glibc symbol switching, LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks, or containers/chroot containing the old distro). Most do the very easy work around of simply recompiling the old source on a new OS and it usually just works. Not very commercial friendly though.
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It blows my mind to think that people are still using any version of Windows, let alone Windows 95. Please, upgrade to an OS that actually works, kids.
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My favorite memory of Windows 95 was the time I installed it on an old Gateway PC I had made the mistake of upgrading from a 486 to a not-quite-Pentium.The installation CD would run, but would take forever to copy the files and then crap out at some point. I spent hours and hours looking at the installation screens telling me how great Windows 95 was going to be while I tried to figure out how to get the damn thing to install.
I did get it working, eventually, but it ran hot and was less reliable than most Windows 95 PCs I had the misfortune of dealing with. A couple months later I installed Slackware on it, and it ran much better.
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I always found it quaint that you’d be digging down into configuration menus in newer versions of Windows, only to find that the place where you actually make the setting change was on an original system configuration screen from Win NT, buried to the point where the general population wouldn’t notice that they were still the same config screens from 25 years ago. But now instead of being 2 mouse clicks away it’s like 10, via menus that have ambiguous names.
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Yeah well, you would start the shutdown. Makes perfect sense to me. Besides, where else would you have looked?
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Oh, Man!
I first obtained Win95 via a special set of disks sold by the Carnegie Mellon bookstore. The price was excellent.
It was a dramatic improvement over Win31. Just SO much more solid and integrated.
I remember buying Win98 and using it on a LOT of systems. It was the go-to OS for me for a long time. WinNT had a “so much better” feel to it that W95 did.
I do 90% of my work on Linux systems now. Win10 seems pretty solid, but there’s still that feeling that it could get root-kitted at any time, and OYE, the chore of those periodic updates.
Well, happy birthday Win95.
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I have Command and Conquer running on my WIN10 machine. Free download no less!
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Y’all should check out Restart Me Up, and excellent book by writer/actress Lesley Tsina that is a parody of the creation of Windows 95. Kindle version is just three bucks on Amazon!
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Yeah, I remember the headline from MacWorld magazine: It’s 1984 all over again! 
OK here’s where we know we’re being trolled.
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Oh, it was indeed way ahead of Mac OS (pre-X) in a whole plethora of categories.
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Well, somebody had to post this…
I was there too, matrix, I had just moved to “Pilot B”. I remember working a 36 hour shift, sleeping at my cubicle overnight during the Win95 launch, waking only for a call. I’ve been in software ever since.
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No way. I forget what pilot I was in. I did end up joining the MCSE study group. I joined when they started on the Win95 MCP. I figured I knew it inside and out so why not. I caught up on Basic Networking and then completed the rest. I ended up switching to the IK multi-media support team for a little bit and then decided it was time for bigger and better things. I ended up migrating to the mothership around 98.
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In 1995 I’d been in IT for almost five years, supporting DOS computers on a Novell LAN at a Seattle law firm. Our latest round of PC purchases were all Windows 95 capable, and I spent months testing and planning the rollout. Microsoft’s Netware drivers were far better than their LAN Manager drivers, because they knew they had to win the Novell crowd to succeed in the business market. I spent hours, if not days, running QEMM scenarios to get the best combination of drivers and DOS into upper memory to free up conventional memory to run Windows and actual applications.
That the was also the era that spawned the phrase “plug and pray.”
Less than a year later, wanting to avoid the firm’s inevitable transition from Netware to Windows NT, I jumped ship to a smaller firm that already had Windows NT 3.51 in place, and had to suffer with the old Windows 3.0 style desktop for a few months until we upgraded to NT 4, with its Windows 95-style interface.
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Never had 95, but the file structure I designed when I got 98 has held up remarkably well over the years: everything goes into “Downloads”, except for new documents which get saved to the Desktop amongst the shortcuts for programs I uninstalled ages ago. Works like a charm.
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