Windows 95: The Most Important Operating System in History

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2021-07-12 19:00:05

This is obviously an opinion piece and a bit of nostalgia but, despite that, Win95 being the most important OS ever is not a claim that I make lightly. I’m a student of this space and there are many great contenders but, in my opinion, none had as dramatic an effect on the entire industry, and certainly none as quickly as Win95.

Now let’s talk a moment about Windows 95 and how it is built; I won’t go into this in great detail because you can read a lot more about this sort of thing at the Wikipedia article on the subject. Suffice to say Win95 is not a jewel of algorithmic perfection by any means. It is nothing like the best operating system Microsoft knew how to build at the time, or was capable of building at the time. We have existential proof of that: look at Windows NT if you like, or consider other contemporaneous operating systems and consider “could Microsoft have built that had it put its best on such an endeavor” I think it’s easy to conclude that cleaner solutions than Win95 could have been found. But none of those were in the offing. And why?

Windows 95 succeeded wildly at this. The number of compromises and special cases and shims was staggering, but it worked; selling over a million units in the first day towards about 40 million units in the first year.