It seems incredible that 27 years (and a few months) have already passed since the launch of Windows 95, during that warm August of the year that, of course, bears this iconic version of Microsoft’s operating system in its own name. Still, to this day, the debate continues as to whether it really was a graphical operating system or if, on the contrary, the operating system was still MS-DOS and all the graphical section was nothing more than a plus, like the icing that turns a cupcake into a cupcake.
The point is that Microsoft, already a software giant but only a small fraction of what it is today, knew what was at stake with such a major release. The default graphical interface, and also much friendlier than the one provided by Windows 3.1 and its predecessors, was intended to bring computing closer to non-professional users, following the steps taken by Apple a decade earlier with the launch of the first MacIntosh.
We remembered, a few months ago, the Windows 95 presentation event, thanks to a recently published video of it. A time capsule in the history of technology, as my colleague Juan defined it, which surely reminded all of us who have already combed gray hair, how we lived that moment. In my case, launch day coincided with getting “the white one” and going home. Again, only the gray-haired will know what I mean, and I remember hearing the news of the launch on a mainstream radio station in the car. I still remember the surprise that it was for me to hear that news along with the news about politics, economy, culture, etc.
That Windows 95 continues to be fondly remembered by many of its users, despite its defects, is something that is confirmed by verifying that interesting tests are still being carried out with it today, and that current commercial programs offer us to give us a bath of nostalgia recovering part of the elements of its graphic interface and its design. And, as we will tell you below, also revealing the most interesting data about its “guts”.
Can you imagine a current game with such an interface? Well, more than one of us burnt our eyelashes playing titles like the first SimCity that you can see in this image. Of course, this is the specific version for Windows 95.
Today we can read, in Ars Technica, that one of Microsoft’s absolute priorities, in view of the launch of Windows 95, was its compatibility with third-party software, including games. This reached the point, according to what is said in said publication, that «the Windows 95 development manager ‘took his truck, drove to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead was still around), and bought a copy of every PC program in the store’. They were all responsible for up to two programs, which they would install, run, and document for errors. If a staff member finished with two, he could go back to take up to two more. And the evaluators could keep what they finished.»
During these tests, of course, certain compatibility problems were detected, before which Microsoft decided to be proactive, integrating solutions to make them work correctly in Windows 95. In the case of SimCity, which was a huge sales success at the time (and to think how such a historic saga ended…), it was detected that the version for Windows 3.x was committing, when running on beta versions of Windows 95 , an error in the management of memory accesses, a bug that made the game not work on the operating system.
And what did Microsoft do? Well, add a specific function to the operating system that detected if SimCity was running and, if so, modified its own memory management system to adapt it to SimCity’s needs. Thus, although Maxis later released a Windows 95-specific version of SimCity, users who had the Windows 3.x version were able to continue using it on the new operating system without any problems.
Those were different times, of course, just a decade later it would have been materially impossible to review the compatibility of Windows with all existing software and, even more, to develop and include in the operating system all the “fixes” necessary for it to work properly. But despite that, or precisely because of that, it is so interesting to look back from time to time, to remember what this industry was like, still emerging at that time, a few decades ago.
