On the point of, "is not enough for the competitor to drop the ball, but someone had to be there to pick it up." The Office 95 release was the culmination of Lotus and WordPerfect dropping the ball not once (slow to adopt GUI), but twice (under resourced or slow to adopt suites). Microsoft was there to pick up the ball both times. One could argue that Office 4 had already shown this, but Windows 95 made PCs much more popular and Office 95 was there to take all of the share from people who weren't already fans of 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Then the fans were overwhelmed by all the other users and eventually switched. Although, I still run into people who are diehard users.
I remember some marketer - sorry, forget who - explaining how much work they'd done to see to it that on launch day, every store had a pallet of Office95 right next to the pallet of Win95. The hype was for Windows - people weren't lining up for Office - but boy they reached out and bought a copy just the same. Huge win.
Yep. We generally planned on around 10% attach and I think we stocked at that level. We exceeded for sure. Everyone was blown away. The in-store setup was mostly driven from the Windows team and was unlike anything (still!). There were at least 4 full page ads in the Aug 24th WSJ from third parties like CompUSA, Dell, etc.
I was going through some boxes in preparation for a cross-country move today and found my original Windows 95 Special Edition box. It was a handout for invited guests at the launch, and there were apparently only 3,000 of them distributed. It's still shrink-wrapped and in perfect condition. If only I had remembered to shrink-wrap myself and then crawled into a box, protected from the environment, for the next 25 years!
Back in Jamaica, I didn't own a computer during the launch, in fact, I didn't get my first computer until 2001 and didn't have access to one until I started studying information technology in 1999. High school is where I got to use Windows 95 and was mesmerized by it! The applications are what I remember most, Office 97, typing my name in Word using Comic Sans, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Worldbook, learning pseudocode algorithms in QDOS, outdated Norton 95, W32 viruses likely brought to school by other students, defragging the computers, blue screen system hangs.
We were assigned two to a computer, the girl that sat beside me hogged the computer most of the time. Obviously proficient in computers, she never gave me the chance to learn or explore. These were on IBM Aptivas, 133 MHz. Lotus Smartsuite 96 was preinstalled, but ignored of course. Still remember my IT teacher at end of each class telling me to 'Save and Exit!' - hello Ms. Hewling. :)
My dad use to take me to this bookstore at the shopping center, behind the store was a business of some kind, I always remember seeing a boxed copy of Windows 95 on a shelf in the office. Years later it changed to a Windows 98 box and I always wondered what it was. Windows 95 was in my peripheral or subconscious, the cloud and sky box. Whats in it? Whats the big deal?
Not knowing anything called software.
At school, we learned the Office applications Word, Excel and Access in order to pass our school based assessment (SBA) exam. Because I didn't have a computer, I was a slow learner. We used text books created by a local info tech trainer, George King. The books were based on Office 95 versions of the apps, but we were using Office 97 by that point. So, some examples used in the text were not applicable like inserting clip art, compatibility issues with Access data files.
My first taste of the Internet was also on Windows 95. I remember one evening my teacher who also thought IT as extra lessons and for adults let me try it. She dialed on to the Windows 95 box next to her NT 4 Server box and launched Netscape. Of course, the big deal then was going to Yahoo.com and searching for something. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson so, thats the first thing I searched for on it.
I miss that cluelessness, naivety I was going through at the time, it felt like an adventure. Just being able to explore the operating system was a mystery, learning a shortcut, putting icons on the desktop. The summer of 1999, I had travelled to Florida for the first time. My mom took a picture of me trying to stuff an iHop omelet; it was a funny picture. When my dad got a computer from work with an IBM Ideascan, I scanned a copy of the picture, saved it to a floppy and set it as the desktop picture on the Windows 95 computer at school. Ms. Hewling saw it immediately and said, ok Mr. Da Costa, now please change it. Everybody in class laughed, but it was just cool that I was able to do that!
Windows 95 in my opinion democratized computer, made the Internet mainstream, really made the idea of software (applications) a value benefit of owning a computer. Computers finally stop being a niche.
I spent a few weeks that summer as a student packing out Windows 95. I think it was ten or so floppies (13 maybe?), plus some paper docs. When they hired us the material wasn’t ready (the floppies I’m guessing) so we were paid to sit on our butts for a few days (and play with the shrink wrap machine). After that it was full tilt to the finish line!
While on the topic, I would like to mention that many sources mentioned that 1Mx16 DRAM was hard to find in 1995 while 4Mx4 DRAM (by then 300 mil) was easier to find. With 4Mx4, the minimum for 486 systems would be 16MB and the minimum for Pentiums would be 32MB.
4x1mb was super common and why upgrades were so challenging. Many machines required matching populated modules and often they were proprietary to the pc oem (especially HP and compaq) making them more expensive. So an upgrade often meant tossing memory not just adding.
Ack :-( Concept was a huge mess. We were lucky that most computers then were not networked and most infections happened by sneaker-net. I will write about this in detail in a future section. Concept came a bit before Windows 95 but for sure the presence of networking and the internet accelerated it. We released updates for Word 6/95 soon after launch.
Of which I should mention that it seems that little effort was put into the macro warning for such a major release, especially in Excel. Remember when "Excel 4.0" macros could not disabled?
I was at WordPerfect (and later, Novell) when the WordPerfect team was stumbling. First, they released WordPerfect for Windows 5.2, which crashed constantly and was not very good compared for Word for Windows 2.0 (I was mad I had to switch word processors!). After that they made the mistake of focusing on WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS and didn't realize until it was too late that what people really wanted was a great Windows 95 app! It was all downhill from there. We tried to compete against Microsoft by buying Borland's apps, but as we all know, that didn't work either.
I was a teenager when Windows 95 was released so like many things of that time it is somewhat a blur. However, I remember looking forward to it a lot. This was despite having spent a lot of time going back and forth between OS/2 2.x, Warp 3 and Windows 3.1 mainly just out of interest. I was already set with 16MB RAM because of OS/2 being demanding, and that was more than enough for Windows 95. In the end, I think I was more impressed with what OS/2 represented technically than actually using it. I don't think I ever thought about OS/2 again after Windows 95 came out. Just having backward-compatible long filenames, proper multitasking, and not having one program crash the whole OS was pretty amazing.
On the Office 95 part, I was part of the "new generation", I guess. I was aware of WordPerfect (and WordStar before it), and I know my parents used both of them (as well as Lotus 1-2-3), but when word processing actually mattered to me, Word 6.0 was already available. I was on Windows and with no backward compatibility concerns, Word was obviously the best choice for Windows, so I never really had a reason to be interested in the other suites.
Having said that, to this day I still type with my fingers tickling CTRL+S because of bad experiences losing high school essays to Word 6 crashes on Windows 3.1. I'm pretty sure most of that went away by the time Office 95 came around.
I knew I wanted Office 95 to go with Windows 95... because, well it was 32-bit just like Windows 95. Not sure I had much other reason.
I vaguely remember some controversy in my small circles about the technical purity of Windows 95 vs OS/2 and that (gasp) maybe it was actually still just a shell running on top of MS-DOS 7.0. No idea if that was true or not, but not sure it mattered because I rarely had to deal with it.
In retrospect, it's amazingly how relatively quickly Windows 95 as a brand-new OS came together when you think about how long it takes simply to rev an OS today with all of the modern-day complexity and backward compatibility concerns.
What a wonderful note. Thank you for sharing your personal story. It always amazes me how many stories there are and how much clarity people remember these early computing experiences. 🙏
Thank you very much for your wonderful stories! They bring back very fond memories of the time and it means a lot to me. And I mean it.
Just like for Andre Da Costa, my computer journey has started with an IBM Aptiva. My Father bought it in early 1996. Cyrix 5x86 CPU (100 MHz), 8MB of RAM, 610MB HDD.
Younger me (on the right) next to this PC in 1996:
It came with a custom IBM-tweaked Windows 95. For example it had Rapid Resume, something very similar to the modern Hibernation found in Windows Vista and later - probably it writes the RAM snapshot to disk and upon the next PC start-up reloads it so booting into Windows from the fully off state takes seconds and you come back to where you left it. It also had full Shut down from Windows, no need to press the Hardware key when it is finally safe to shut down, this is a hardware feature I suppose but still cool. And this Windows 95 came with lots of IBM software goodies. Lotus SmartSuite 96, Cyberia (game), Descent (game) etc.
But my favorite toy was the Windows 95 CD. It also had a "child next to a PC monitor" holographic sticker seen in one of your stories. Totally forgot about this sticker and was happy to see it again.
Weezer - Buddy Holly, Good Times Bad Times, Hover. All this good stuff.
I've learnt to use the Windows 95 GUI myself as a kid by just using it on my own. It tells a lot about how good it is. And this Windows 95 was very stable. I've never seen a Blue Screen (up until I started experimenting with installing new hardware and installed Windows 98 on this IBM Aptiva in the early 2000s). The performance was perfect. Good and useful Apps. Microsoft Encarta 97 was one of my favorite. It is a Design Masterpiece. Loved all the 27 videos and the small games there.
Good times.
Steven, I've first heard about you sometime around the first Windows 8 public beta release (which I installed straightaway) I believe. And became a huge fan of you. I think that Zune HD OS, Windows Phone 7/8 and Windows 8 is the pinnacle of OS Evolution. Windows 8 was a great tablet experience and very fast indeed. And they all looked and felt just amazing, it was a pure aesthetic pleasure using them every time.
I had Nokia Lumia 920. Twice. Running Windows Phone 8. Still the best phone and the OS I've ever used. Wish I could continue using.
I would be very interested in your a Story of how the concepts behind these OSes came to be. Who proposed this radical amazing flat and minimalist design, first for Zune HD and then Metro/Modern. The Development iterations towards the final shape. And why did it go downhill to Windows 10/Windows Mobile 10 with less elegant and streamlined UIs borrowing from Android and other OSes. Would be an amazing story to learn.
Interestingly, I had been sneaking home early debug builds of Windows 95 for over a year, installing it on my 486 and loving it! I got to use it at work (Novell), and at home, and my friend and I developed and released Media Changer, a Shareware app to cycle wallpaper and sounds. It was the first such app for Windows 95 as far as I know.
On the point of, "is not enough for the competitor to drop the ball, but someone had to be there to pick it up." The Office 95 release was the culmination of Lotus and WordPerfect dropping the ball not once (slow to adopt GUI), but twice (under resourced or slow to adopt suites). Microsoft was there to pick up the ball both times. One could argue that Office 4 had already shown this, but Windows 95 made PCs much more popular and Office 95 was there to take all of the share from people who weren't already fans of 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Then the fans were overwhelmed by all the other users and eventually switched. Although, I still run into people who are diehard users.
I remember some marketer - sorry, forget who - explaining how much work they'd done to see to it that on launch day, every store had a pallet of Office95 right next to the pallet of Win95. The hype was for Windows - people weren't lining up for Office - but boy they reached out and bought a copy just the same. Huge win.
Yep. We generally planned on around 10% attach and I think we stocked at that level. We exceeded for sure. Everyone was blown away. The in-store setup was mostly driven from the Windows team and was unlike anything (still!). There were at least 4 full page ads in the Aug 24th WSJ from third parties like CompUSA, Dell, etc.
I was going through some boxes in preparation for a cross-country move today and found my original Windows 95 Special Edition box. It was a handout for invited guests at the launch, and there were apparently only 3,000 of them distributed. It's still shrink-wrapped and in perfect condition. If only I had remembered to shrink-wrap myself and then crawled into a box, protected from the environment, for the next 25 years!
Back in Jamaica, I didn't own a computer during the launch, in fact, I didn't get my first computer until 2001 and didn't have access to one until I started studying information technology in 1999. High school is where I got to use Windows 95 and was mesmerized by it! The applications are what I remember most, Office 97, typing my name in Word using Comic Sans, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Worldbook, learning pseudocode algorithms in QDOS, outdated Norton 95, W32 viruses likely brought to school by other students, defragging the computers, blue screen system hangs.
We were assigned two to a computer, the girl that sat beside me hogged the computer most of the time. Obviously proficient in computers, she never gave me the chance to learn or explore. These were on IBM Aptivas, 133 MHz. Lotus Smartsuite 96 was preinstalled, but ignored of course. Still remember my IT teacher at end of each class telling me to 'Save and Exit!' - hello Ms. Hewling. :)
My dad use to take me to this bookstore at the shopping center, behind the store was a business of some kind, I always remember seeing a boxed copy of Windows 95 on a shelf in the office. Years later it changed to a Windows 98 box and I always wondered what it was. Windows 95 was in my peripheral or subconscious, the cloud and sky box. Whats in it? Whats the big deal?
Not knowing anything called software.
At school, we learned the Office applications Word, Excel and Access in order to pass our school based assessment (SBA) exam. Because I didn't have a computer, I was a slow learner. We used text books created by a local info tech trainer, George King. The books were based on Office 95 versions of the apps, but we were using Office 97 by that point. So, some examples used in the text were not applicable like inserting clip art, compatibility issues with Access data files.
My first taste of the Internet was also on Windows 95. I remember one evening my teacher who also thought IT as extra lessons and for adults let me try it. She dialed on to the Windows 95 box next to her NT 4 Server box and launched Netscape. Of course, the big deal then was going to Yahoo.com and searching for something. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson so, thats the first thing I searched for on it.
I miss that cluelessness, naivety I was going through at the time, it felt like an adventure. Just being able to explore the operating system was a mystery, learning a shortcut, putting icons on the desktop. The summer of 1999, I had travelled to Florida for the first time. My mom took a picture of me trying to stuff an iHop omelet; it was a funny picture. When my dad got a computer from work with an IBM Ideascan, I scanned a copy of the picture, saved it to a floppy and set it as the desktop picture on the Windows 95 computer at school. Ms. Hewling saw it immediately and said, ok Mr. Da Costa, now please change it. Everybody in class laughed, but it was just cool that I was able to do that!
Windows 95 in my opinion democratized computer, made the Internet mainstream, really made the idea of software (applications) a value benefit of owning a computer. Computers finally stop being a niche.
Awesome story. Thank you for sharing.
I spent a few weeks that summer as a student packing out Windows 95. I think it was ten or so floppies (13 maybe?), plus some paper docs. When they hired us the material wasn’t ready (the floppies I’m guessing) so we were paid to sit on our butts for a few days (and play with the shrink wrap machine). After that it was full tilt to the finish line!
That’s awesome! I think Windows released to manufacturing on 7/11. That’s the date on all the files. They probably sent it to MFG a few days later.
Here’s a report (2min video, and text) from the launch in Dublin, Ireland. Don’t know why they asked an Apple distributor for a quote…
https://www.rte.ie/archives/2015/0624/710283-windows-95-launched/
While on the topic, I would like to mention that many sources mentioned that 1Mx16 DRAM was hard to find in 1995 while 4Mx4 DRAM (by then 300 mil) was easier to find. With 4Mx4, the minimum for 486 systems would be 16MB and the minimum for Pentiums would be 32MB.
RAM availability was important to end users for performance, but I think at that time only our pricey developer machines had that much RAM.
4x1mb was super common and why upgrades were so challenging. Many machines required matching populated modules and often they were proprietary to the pc oem (especially HP and compaq) making them more expensive. So an upgrade often meant tossing memory not just adding.
Of course 1Mx16 was not very relevant to the upgrade market that still often used 30-pin SIMMs.
On the same day as the Windows 95/Office 95 launch came the "prank macro", aka the first macro virus.
Ack :-( Concept was a huge mess. We were lucky that most computers then were not networked and most infections happened by sneaker-net. I will write about this in detail in a future section. Concept came a bit before Windows 95 but for sure the presence of networking and the internet accelerated it. We released updates for Word 6/95 soon after launch.
Only Word 7.0a.
I recall as best I can what we ended up doing was the remediation tool for 16 bit and also changed the autorun/normal.dot stuff for 32-bit.
Word 7.0a was the update adding the macro warning. Before then there was SCANPROT, which was not very good.
Sounds right. :-)
I forget to mention the effect on "Office96", which was going to unify Word/Excel/PowerPoint into VBA.
Of which I should mention that it seems that little effort was put into the macro warning for such a major release, especially in Excel. Remember when "Excel 4.0" macros could not disabled?
I was at WordPerfect (and later, Novell) when the WordPerfect team was stumbling. First, they released WordPerfect for Windows 5.2, which crashed constantly and was not very good compared for Word for Windows 2.0 (I was mad I had to switch word processors!). After that they made the mistake of focusing on WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS and didn't realize until it was too late that what people really wanted was a great Windows 95 app! It was all downhill from there. We tried to compete against Microsoft by buying Borland's apps, but as we all know, that didn't work either.
Thank you for sharing. I have a copy of the Borland word perfect office suite. What a giant box!
I was a teenager when Windows 95 was released so like many things of that time it is somewhat a blur. However, I remember looking forward to it a lot. This was despite having spent a lot of time going back and forth between OS/2 2.x, Warp 3 and Windows 3.1 mainly just out of interest. I was already set with 16MB RAM because of OS/2 being demanding, and that was more than enough for Windows 95. In the end, I think I was more impressed with what OS/2 represented technically than actually using it. I don't think I ever thought about OS/2 again after Windows 95 came out. Just having backward-compatible long filenames, proper multitasking, and not having one program crash the whole OS was pretty amazing.
On the Office 95 part, I was part of the "new generation", I guess. I was aware of WordPerfect (and WordStar before it), and I know my parents used both of them (as well as Lotus 1-2-3), but when word processing actually mattered to me, Word 6.0 was already available. I was on Windows and with no backward compatibility concerns, Word was obviously the best choice for Windows, so I never really had a reason to be interested in the other suites.
Having said that, to this day I still type with my fingers tickling CTRL+S because of bad experiences losing high school essays to Word 6 crashes on Windows 3.1. I'm pretty sure most of that went away by the time Office 95 came around.
I knew I wanted Office 95 to go with Windows 95... because, well it was 32-bit just like Windows 95. Not sure I had much other reason.
I vaguely remember some controversy in my small circles about the technical purity of Windows 95 vs OS/2 and that (gasp) maybe it was actually still just a shell running on top of MS-DOS 7.0. No idea if that was true or not, but not sure it mattered because I rarely had to deal with it.
In retrospect, it's amazingly how relatively quickly Windows 95 as a brand-new OS came together when you think about how long it takes simply to rev an OS today with all of the modern-day complexity and backward compatibility concerns.
What a wonderful note. Thank you for sharing your personal story. It always amazes me how many stories there are and how much clarity people remember these early computing experiences. 🙏
Dear Steven,
Thank you very much for your wonderful stories! They bring back very fond memories of the time and it means a lot to me. And I mean it.
Just like for Andre Da Costa, my computer journey has started with an IBM Aptiva. My Father bought it in early 1996. Cyrix 5x86 CPU (100 MHz), 8MB of RAM, 610MB HDD.
Younger me (on the right) next to this PC in 1996:
https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*tJV91cUcMZy4-iFKtPn7Jg.jpeg
It came with a custom IBM-tweaked Windows 95. For example it had Rapid Resume, something very similar to the modern Hibernation found in Windows Vista and later - probably it writes the RAM snapshot to disk and upon the next PC start-up reloads it so booting into Windows from the fully off state takes seconds and you come back to where you left it. It also had full Shut down from Windows, no need to press the Hardware key when it is finally safe to shut down, this is a hardware feature I suppose but still cool. And this Windows 95 came with lots of IBM software goodies. Lotus SmartSuite 96, Cyberia (game), Descent (game) etc.
But my favorite toy was the Windows 95 CD. It also had a "child next to a PC monitor" holographic sticker seen in one of your stories. Totally forgot about this sticker and was happy to see it again.
Weezer - Buddy Holly, Good Times Bad Times, Hover. All this good stuff.
I've learnt to use the Windows 95 GUI myself as a kid by just using it on my own. It tells a lot about how good it is. And this Windows 95 was very stable. I've never seen a Blue Screen (up until I started experimenting with installing new hardware and installed Windows 98 on this IBM Aptiva in the early 2000s). The performance was perfect. Good and useful Apps. Microsoft Encarta 97 was one of my favorite. It is a Design Masterpiece. Loved all the 27 videos and the small games there.
Good times.
Steven, I've first heard about you sometime around the first Windows 8 public beta release (which I installed straightaway) I believe. And became a huge fan of you. I think that Zune HD OS, Windows Phone 7/8 and Windows 8 is the pinnacle of OS Evolution. Windows 8 was a great tablet experience and very fast indeed. And they all looked and felt just amazing, it was a pure aesthetic pleasure using them every time.
I had Nokia Lumia 920. Twice. Running Windows Phone 8. Still the best phone and the OS I've ever used. Wish I could continue using.
I would be very interested in your a Story of how the concepts behind these OSes came to be. Who proposed this radical amazing flat and minimalist design, first for Zune HD and then Metro/Modern. The Development iterations towards the final shape. And why did it go downhill to Windows 10/Windows Mobile 10 with less elegant and streamlined UIs borrowing from Android and other OSes. Would be an amazing story to learn.
Thank you very much!
Best Regards,
Stepan
Thank you so much for sharing. Such a fun story!! 🙏
Interestingly, I had been sneaking home early debug builds of Windows 95 for over a year, installing it on my 486 and loving it! I got to use it at work (Novell), and at home, and my friend and I developed and released Media Changer, a Shareware app to cycle wallpaper and sounds. It was the first such app for Windows 95 as far as I know.