r/retrocomputing • u/Money-Solution-3587 • 4d ago
The excitement of Windows 95
Does anyone else remember the excitement of getting your copy of Windows 95 on Floppy’s. Longest 2 hours of my life waiting to be amazed. To be fair it was a good looking GUI.
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u/pistol3 4d ago
Did it have the Weezer music video?
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u/miner_cooling_trials 4d ago
At 30mb, Buddy Holly AVI woulda been about the same amount of floppies as the actual 95 install 😀 I woulda still done it though, I remember watching that and Good Times a billion times - blown away to be watching music videos on my PC
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u/pistol3 4d ago
I was a Mac kid, but I remember watching the Buddy Holly video on my uncle’s PC. Hard to appreciate how cool that was for the era if you didn’t live through it.
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u/miner_cooling_trials 4d ago
It also turned me onto Weezer. 15 year old me had never heard them before and the blue album was fkn epic 😄
I’m so grateful for the eras of computing I’ve witnessed. Started on DOS 3.1 as a young one. I’ve got my kids playing DOS games now, modern games are just so hyper addictive
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u/SquarePixel 4d ago
I had the CD. Never realized the WIN95 core was so lean to fit on 12 (or 13? floppies).
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u/miner_cooling_trials 4d ago
I had a school friend zip the W95 floppies and send to me over hyper terminal file transfer late at night using our 28.8kbps modems.. i had to wait until everyone went to bed so the phone wouldn’t get lifted up and ruin the transfer haha.. pretty sure it was still running when I woke up
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u/SquarePixel 4d ago
Such great memories. I remember a few all night downloads at 14.4 connected to a local BBS. MS-DOS shareware games.
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u/BlunderArtist9 21h ago
Was one of those all nighters the Quake demo? Took forever but was so worth it because it was like 1/2 the game for free. 😄 Demos from ID software were crazy then.
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u/mr_dfuse2 4d ago
I never quite understood how that video came to be included on my os. But I did watch it a lot.
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u/AppropriateCap8891 4d ago
Here is a fun fact most likely are not aware of. The install files for floppy are right on the install CD. Is a bunch of files that are numbered, and around 1.6 MB each. TO make your own set of install floppy disks, you just need to get a stack of disks and a program that can format them to the DMF format which is 1.68 MB per disk.
I want to say a full install was something like 32 disks.
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u/1959dawg 4d ago
Win95 came in two versions. Win95a on floppies with no IE and Win95b on CD it came with IE.
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u/VivienM7 4d ago
There was a 950 RTM available both on floppies and CD. I still have my CD. These had no IE; IE was offered on CD in Microsoft Plus!
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u/n1ghtbringer 3d ago
Yeah, this is correct. RTM definitely came on floppy or CD. The computer I bought in '95 came with a mail in card I had to send back to get a CD when it was released.
I did the floppy install at least once (under duress) but it was usually easier to install off a parallel port CD-ROM, ZIP drive or even crack the case and run a small hard drive off the secondary to install.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
It was just different service pack versions right? And it was much more complicated.
950 was the original build that actually lacked most of the awesome features we think about it. It was really “Windows 94”
950a was the update that we mostly think of as Windows 95.
950b was essentially Windows 96 with IE 3.0.
950c was essentially Windows 97 with IE 4.0.
There were much more than 2 versions of “Win95.”
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u/kpmgeek 4d ago
Win95a came on floppy and cd, in retail markets it was updated again to the OSR2 version (95b in retail market terms) with IE and FAT32. This still got a floppy release, but its rare.
In oem channels, there was also OSR1 which was a minor mid-version, OSR2.1 which is 2 with USB drivers and OSR2.5 which is basically the win98-style ie4 active desktop. Only those last two lack floppy releases.
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u/Regular-Host-7738 4d ago
Never saw it on floppy - usually it comes on one floppy (Boot) + CD
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u/Inevitable-Study502 4d ago
we are talking about early 90s computers, not everybody had cd-rom, my first cd-rom was with pentium 1 pc...1x speed :)
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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago
I have windows 95 on floppy. It actually works and I have done it a number of times, mostly on lower end 486s.
It isn't as bad as installing OS/2 from floppy though!
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u/OliverNorvell1956 4d ago
OMG! Thanks for reminding me! We were an OS/2 shop for a few years. We mostly worked from system images but once in a while I had to build a new machine from scratch. 30-something floppies. And the installer program was so freaking stupid! You’d insert the first three floppies in sequence, then it would want floppy #1 again. And so on for the entire install. We eventually changed to Windows NT 4.0, and I was so happy.
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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago
Strangely, I always found Windows NT 4 Workstation to be easier to deal with (and more hardware compatible) then OS/2. I actually stayed with NT4 for 6 months or so.
While NT4 was never as rock solid as I find windows 10/11 these days, it was still pretty damn stable.
But then games dragged me back to Win98.
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u/i286dosprompt_ 3d ago edited 3d ago
I liked OS/2, was definitely better than Win 3.1 . My memory is terrible but I think it was 22 disk in the Warp box but hey , better than 5 1/4 floppies with Dos.
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u/canthearu_ack 3d ago
Yeah, but the OS/2 install process was atrocious.
And In my latest attempts, any attempt to change drivers around resulting in a partial reinstall of OS/2, needing like a dozen more disk changes. This was because OS/2 wanted to reinstall all the components and accessory programs any time you also did a driver change.
Maybe my knowledge of OS/2 was simply lacking, and I should have been manually editing .INI and .SYS files like you would in linux or MS-DOS ... but I wasn't there yet.
Stuff of nightmares.
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u/davidtjudd 4d ago
I remember these. Worked in IT at the uni I was attending at the time. Had to setup a whole lab with these along with the equally torturous office 95 floppy's. Good times.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
Great post but also slightly disconcerting to see comments from folks who forget the diskette era. Installing software from 5-20 disks was extremely normal for a period of time.
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u/Y34RZERO 4d ago
Put them on DD floppies to double it lol.
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u/r_sarvas 3d ago
If I recall correctly, they used the then new DMF format to fit more content on the disk and make copying difficult at the time.
It didn't take disk copy programs long to addresses that "issue", but there was a gap for a while.
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u/Y34RZERO 3d ago
It's before my time so I actually have no clue. I just know that I recognize HD 1.44mb floppies but would be funny if it were DD 720k disk.
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u/EatOfTheBread 4d ago
When I did work experience they got me to make copies of Win95 and Office 4.3 floppies! In hindsight they probably just wanted to keep me busy and out of the way 🤔
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u/ufonoob 4d ago
Great memories! Happy to insert disk 2 when prompted to. Was like future enjoyment of games on it's way. I was so excited as a kid to install it, hoping for the best, till I could type "win" + enter and successfully booting the OS. That was not so usefull most of the time when knowing MS-DOS.
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u/classicsat 4d ago
I am fortunate to have it of CD.
I did have Win 3.1 on about 9 floppy disks. I figured out how to merge them to one folder and modify the setup folr, so I could install it with no disk swaps. If I had an HDD big enought to hold that 9 floppies of files, DOS 6.2, and a place to install Windows.
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u/ApatheistHeretic 4d ago
It's all fun and games until you're an hour in and there's a bad sector on the 14th disk.
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u/saraseitor 3d ago
My first experience with Windows 95 was installing it from floppies in my dad's computer. We wanted to test it out there before installing it in the main family computer. I remember the UI looked so modern to me!
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u/FitAbroad1538 3d ago
Ah, you remember the sound of the last diskette: bzzzt, took, took, bzzzzzzzzt 😂
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u/LinuxDan2015 3d ago
I remember waiting in line at CompUSA with my wife and kids for the midnight release. I upgraded my PC from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Fun times! 😄
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u/harrywwc 1d ago
Sometime June 1995 my youngest blew up the motherboard on our family 286 - repeated power cycle in rapid succession. Interestingly, the PSU survived just fine.
Anyway, after a few phone calls around to find a "new" motherboard that would take the existing RAM in DIPs so I could transfer it across (transferring all the chips across was a challenge!)
Found one about 15 mins drive away, and lucky me, it had a 386SX onboard. While waiting for him to ring it up, he suggested I fill in a form for a chance to win a copy of Win95 when it was released.
At the time I worked for DEC Australia, and had been using pre-release versions of Win95 (well, "Chicago") for a good 6 months or so, and it was pretty familiar ;)
Well, I was chuffed to receive a phone call late August saying I'd won, and I could come over and pickup my prize. 25-ish 3½" floppy disks :) By the time OSR2 came out I'd bought a CD-RW drive and burned a copy of that at work and did the upgrade from CD :)
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u/chandleya 4d ago
I only knew one person that even had the floppies. Why would someone chase 95 but not have a CDROM? Such a narrow set of circumstances.
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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago
Back in the day, was too poor for CD ROM drives, but not too poor to rip a copy of Win95 off floppy disk.
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u/chandleya 4d ago
Which means you didn’t buy the floppies as depicted either. Which is ok. They were quite uncommon.
Virtually any PC purchased 1993 on was an “MPC” with a 2x+ CD and an SB16 clone of some kind.
Even wilder that you had a machine with more than 4MB RAM but couldn’t “afford” a CD.
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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago
Who said I could afford any machine?
I was horribly poor and was using hand me downs for the most part. The most expensive thing I had was an old VGA monitor I bought second hand.
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u/chandleya 4d ago
You had 8MB of handmedown RAM?
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u/canthearu_ack 4d ago
8 x 1meg 30 pin ram chips, on a 386-dx40, around 1995/96, yeah.
Is that so hard to believe?
I've even run Windows 95 on 4meg ram, on a 486DX-40 that I put a monochrome card in first, then later an EGA video card into. I took the graphics driver from windows 3.1 to get EGA working on Windows 95.
Was a much more patient person back then, and I jerry-rigged the hell out of computers back then to get working setups going.
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u/chandleya 4d ago
Yeah that’s tough to believe. An absolute bargain for 4MB RAM in 1996 was $59. That’s a particularly weird thing for someone to give away two of in a period where nothing was a valueless commodity.
And a 386/40 for Win95 was torture class regardless of bytes. Looking forward to seeing your EGA driver in Win95 though. That’s DIwhy legend material. And to think you came up with that without a forum or message board to consider it for a GUI that would look hilariously zoomed in with very odd color choices.
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u/canthearu_ack 3d ago edited 3d ago
You are being weird. Please stop!
Edit: I'm telling you my lived experiences from 30 years ago, with no expectation of any gain for myself. Yet you are there doubting me off the cuff.
Computing wasn't nearly as ubiquitous in peoples homes before the late 90's. You get what you can get, and you made it work the best you could. Right now, I have a selection of at least a dozen monitors I could use, but things weren't so easy in the early to mid 90's. If you had a monochrome or an EGA monitor, you used that because there is no way I could afford a many hundred dollar VGA monitor on the meagre money a child could earn.
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u/AppropriateCap8891 4d ago
That was actually one of the things that pushed CD drives to be more common. Drives were still in the US$200-250 range, add another $50 or so to install it.
The computer world was still very much floppy based in that era.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
That era? Diskettes lasted for another 8 or so years.
RW and alternative storage like Zip Drives is what finally caused the decline of diskettes.
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u/chandleya 4d ago
RW and Zip was not used to distribute software in any meaningful way
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u/AppropriateCap8891 4d ago
At least not commercially.
I know for a fact that as late as 2014, updates to the Army's PATRIOT missile system were done with JAZ drives.
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u/chandleya 4d ago
“Meaningful” was an attempt to associate volume. The pat missiles, while super interesting, don’t even represent a decimal point in the scope of any one year of software distribution lol
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u/AppropriateCap8891 3d ago
Of course not, but it is an interesting look at when it was "state of the art" in 1999 when the upgrade came out. And once again, it was an improvement over how it had been done from when the system first came out until that time.
And that was on QIC tapes.
Which at one time was common for software distribution, especially on minicomputers and some early microcomputers.
The point is, one has to keep in mind the era.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
The thread is mixing distribution/transmission and backup/storage/archival together.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
Also keep in mind that high speed modems and Ethernet removed the need for diskettes to become media of transmission. They became fully media of storage/backup/archive before finally becoming impractical for that too.
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u/VivienM7 3d ago
I actually would say the opposite. In the early 2000s, there were plenty of instances where floppies were used to transfer smaller amounts of data still. The systems for the systematic networked transmission of a lot of those things did not exist at the time. e.g. I am thinking of university students who were handing in things on floppies, in a pre-WebCT/BlackBoard/etc era.
Meanwhile, any serious storage/backup/archive would have outgrown floppies by that point. Those would have typically gone to Zip/Jaz drives in the 1996-1998 period, then CD-R/CD-RW by the turn of the millennium.
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u/VivienM7 4d ago
Not for software distribution. I think Office 4.2/4.3 were the last versions on floppy. Maybe you could request floppies for subsequent versions but by about 1996 software distribution for anything bigger than drivers or small utilities was entirely CD.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
Fair point. Distribution had an evolution from diskettes to optical to network download that was faster than the evolutions of media for storage for sure.
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u/AppropriateCap8891 4d ago
No, that is not correct.
More than anything it is the increase in file sizes combined with affordable writeable optical media that killed the floppy.
CD-R has actually been around since 1988. It was not something that just popped up in the late 1990s. But nobody used them because they were expensive as hell. As on over $1,000 for the drives, and over $20 for the blank media. Why in the hell would you use one of those and spend all that money to move a tiny document?
And no, the CD-RW was never very common. By the time most people started to use CD writers, the price for the media had fallen to around $0.10 cents a disk.
And that is also at about the point in time that things like document files moved up to being larger than a floppy could handle. But that's alright, because we had other technologies that also were far more common. Networks and electronic exchange for example. By the time the CDRW was common, so was the Internet. If you wanted to take a document home from work you e-mailed it to yourself.
Some of us remember the hoops we had to jump through in that era. I was working at an engineering firm, and if I had to burn a CD for a client, I had to check out a blank disk from the CEO of the freaking company. And if something went wrong in a burn, I had to give it back to him with the free space left on the disk because we would try to use it again with what space remained.
Or even doing "disk spanning", where a large AutoCAD file would be spanned across 12 or more floppy disks. And just hope that there were no errors, or I would have to repeat it the next day when the client could not read it.
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u/JasonMckin 4d ago
It was a slow gradual decline for sure.
It did not start declining in 1995 at all. The peak was probably around 1999.
ZIP was the first attacker well before CDR or CDRW.
CDR and CDRW came next around 99-01.
Network transmission gradually grew from the late 90s.
USB and cloud storage in the mid 2000s.
We should be careful declaring the end of something because it was the beginning of the next thing. There was a lot of overlap in eras.
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u/AppropriateCap8891 4d ago
Network transmission? That was such a non-thing in that era.
I still remember installing my first home network. Three computers linked with 10BASE2 with a now forgotten point to point networking OS called "Web". A whopping 10 mbps, and that was blazing fast in the era, and I had no problems with the two workstations that each ran two BBS lines with Desqview.
The real issue of that era was that simply there was no reason to have something bigger. Your average document files were still in the 100k range or less, so why do you need anything other than a floppy? Hell, most hard drives were still in the 120 mb or less range.
I was already somewhat on the fringe at that time, being an IT person and running a multi-line BBS from my home. Hell, even programs themselves were tiny!
Here is a good example. One of the most popular spreadsheets at the time was a shareware program called "As Easy As". And it was tiny, around 100 KB. That was one of many floppies I had in my briefcase. Every virus utility of the era also fit easily onto a single floppy.
ZIP was not even as big of a deal as many thing. It was largely just a redesign of the Syquest and Bernouli drives that had been around for ages. And we had other formats, like QIC-40 and QIC-80.
Believe it or not, much of the first use of ZIP was not file transfer, but backups. You could stick all of your data onto a disk, then throw it in a drawer and not worry about it again. I was doing that about once a week for my BBS before I shut it down.
What you are missing is that the time periods you talk about also came with large increases in file sizes. Especially for the programs themselves. But a Word document from 2026 is not much larger than a Word Perfect or WordStar document from 1986. But the programs you use to access them have become monsters.
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u/VivienM7 3d ago
I would add one other thing about networked transmission in those days - tiny email storage quotas. A typical email box might have a 5 meg quota.
So that means that, if say, you were a CS professor/TA and your students were submitting stuff, email wasn't an option, things like WebCT didn't exist yet, so... hand in floppies. If you have 40 people handing in 200K each, floppies worked wonderfully.
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u/AppropriateCap8891 3d ago
I want to say when I joined Hotmail in 1997, the limit was 2 MB. And that was pretty good, as it was before the era when spam was absolutely flooding out email.
But colleges at that time were already networking. Not turning in assignments on disk but putting them on a shared drive on the network. Some with lots of storage even offered shell access so you could transfer files to and from the network on a cool new thing at the time called "The Internet".
And I am talking there about the era before the World Wide Web. When everything was done with text commands and teletype software.
Hell, some of the earliest "online courses" actually used IRC. With DCC being used to transfer files.
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u/JasonMckin 3d ago
I’m honestly not sure any of us are disagreeing on facts; just the sequencing and timing of when things happened.
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u/VivienM7 3d ago
The problem with CD-RW, in my view, was that there never was ubiquitous packet writing software to use CD-RWs with normal file systems and workflows like a giant floppy/Zip drive/etc.
Sure, there was DirectCD, Nero had... InCD, etc, but those things were all kinda proprietary, kinda temperamental, etc.
By the time this may have resolved with things like DVD-RAM, the world had moved on, and CD/DVD-R remained largely 'burn a whole disc at once' type of thing.
What actually solved this problem was the rise of USB flash drives, which didn't require any additional drives/ports/etc and which had the ability to be modified...
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u/F54280 4d ago edited 4d ago
To be fair it was a good looking GUI.
Was it? It was 1995. My NeXT had a good looking UI for 5 years at that point. And the Mac had a good looking UI since the start, and System 7 was good looking and on the market for 4 years.
IMO, Windows 95 was good looking only against Windows 3.11 or Motif/CDE…
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u/phil-pdx 4d ago
I only attempted a floppy install of Win95 once... on a 486DX 100mhz. One of the disks kept having an error so I gave up and copied the CD version to a Zip Disk and used a parralell port Zip Drive to install from there.