Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the retail release of Windows 95.
I can’t tell you how hard it was to resist that as a Geek Trivia topic,
but I’m certain that every major tech news outlet is going to have a
story on the subject, if only to get more mileage out of the stock
footage from 1995, when people were literally lining up at office
supply stores and software shops to get their hands on the OS (For
those of us who remember Windows 3.1, we understand why the general
public was desperate for a better GUI.) Also, I doubt there is any
serious technogeek out there who wouldn’t consider Win95 trivia a
remedial subject.
That said, I remember Win95 as the DOS-killer, the OS that absolved the
end-user from any responsibility of knowing anything at all about the
command line, and dragged the mainstream market away from the efficient
simplicity that only Linux users may now seem to enjoy. I’d also argue
that this is the day the Windows-Linux feud really began, as the world
separated into “you’ll take my command line when you pry it from cold
dead hands” holdouts and the “WYSIWYG at any cost, save me from typing
anything ever” majority. (Not that I don’t prefer a GUI, I just hate
the notion of a one-size-fits-all uber-kernel that requires constant
fiddling and tweaking to keep safe and functional, to say nothing of
the regularly scheduled reinstall to clear out the WinRot.)
So, for all you tech historians out there, let’s hoist a glass for a
decade since Microsoft abandoned x86 16-bit support, finally gave us
long file names, and forgot to tell its own A/V program for Windows 3.1
that the 95 upgrade file wasn’t in fact a virus (that part is either funny, ironic, or scarily prescient, and maybe all three).
Ah, memories.
