10 years ago today...

Guy Lavoie

Active Member
...Windows 95 was released with a level of hype and fanfare that hasn't been seen since. What are your thoughts on Win 95? Were you an early adopter or did you wait till it proved itself somewhat? Whas it a turning point in personal computing?

Myself, I waited a fair bit before using it, since I hadn't really used Win 3.1 much either, sticking to reliable ole DOS as long as it worked for me. I guess it was the need to access the Internet that created my first real need for a graphical OS.
 
I was an early adoptor. I like technology and I'm a programmer that, at the time, work for a software company that did multimedia software so we were looking at porting our app to the new world of 32 bits.

Eric
 
I was a beta-tester. By the time it was released I had four machines running it on a WinNT network. Looking back, it was not nearly as painful as the more recent upgrades. Except for the MSN part . . .
 
Since Win3.1 I have pretty much jumped on board each significant Win OS as they came out. I am sure I'll do the same with Vista. I even looked for a download link but found you have to be on the MS subscription program - unless someone else has a better link to share???
 
I used Windows 3.1 until WinME and 2K came out. My only home PC at the time was a 486 75mhz Laptop that had only a floppy and 40MB HDD. At work (DoD seems to wait a few years to change OS's, I'm just now starting to see wide-spread use of WinXP) we used Windows for workgroups (3.11, I think) until 1999/2000, although there were some units on the "cutting edge" that used NT4.0.

My first upgrade at home was when I bought a PC with WinME on it in September 2000. That machine (PIII800), now running XPHome, is still the primary PC at home, with the newest PC in the house (AthlonXP2600+)dedicated to HomeSeer/MLServer and the like, running XPPro... The old PC is fine for email, web browsing, and even PhotoShop, FlashMX, and DreamWeaver.

About the same time (1999-2000) they started upgrading machines at work to Win98, and new machines began to arrive with Win2k installed.

It cracks me up that the PC I use at work now is a brand new 3.6ghz model, and the most demanding thing I do with it your basic MS stuff, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
 
When 95 came out, I barely had used Win3.1, after making the switch from my Amiga 2000. When I went to a friend that was heavy into the PC scene, I had him help me put together a 100Mhz PC (Pretty top of the line at the time!). It was like pulling teeth to get him to help me put 95 on that system! He knew 3.1 inside and out, and did not approve of the switch. (I think he was more worried that he knew nothing about it :p ).

So we did install 95, from a whopping 13 floppy disks purchased the night before at Wal~Mart. He was actually impressed with his first taste of it. It also reminded me more of the Amiga's OS than Win3.1 ever did.

From that point I have always adopted the new OS's as soon as I could get ahold of them, with the exception of Millenium of course :). Well actually I did install Milennium, and went back a couple months later to 98SE after all the discussions and bugs became well known and talked about. Keeping true to that statement, I am running Windows XP 2005 Media Center Edition on all of my PC's now.

HOPEFULLY I can continue to run my computers over the next few days, as yet another Hurricane is headed our way and will be here in about 5 hours. The last 2 to hit here caused power loss for 5 days and 4 days respectively. I am not looking for a repeat of that again! Strange thing happened, when the power was out here, all of my voice activated triggers would not work :)
 
I was very heavy into using DOS and Deskview for multitasking in dos. So when win95 came out I very eagerly tried it out. Ran it for a month, got frustrated and removed it. couple months later re-installed it again.

Ran Windows 95 Until NT 4.0 came out then windows 2000 and now Windows XP PRO. never tried any of the other 9x versions..

I found NT 4.0 to be extremely stable for me.

I still miss my commodore 64, when it crashed all you had to do was turn it off and back on again. instant OS re-install.. :p

StevenE
 
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