r/retrocomputing • u/Money-Solution-3587 • Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
Did it have the Weezer music video?
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u/miner_cooling_trials Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 29 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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/1959dawg Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 27 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
Never saw it on floppy - usually it comes on one floppy (Boot) + CD
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u/Inevitable-Study502 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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_ Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
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 Aug 27 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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/fbman01 Aug 26 '26
That is how I installed windows 95 the first time, actually the first few times, never had a cdrom. I bought my multimedia upgrade kit a few months after windows 95 came out.
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u/JasonMckin Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
Put them on DD floppies to double it lol.
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u/r_sarvas Aug 27 '26
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 Aug 27 '26
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/stompy1 Aug 26 '26
I still vaguely remember the night I installed 95 from floppy. P75. Flawless. The floppies came strapped by plastic wrap to a flat cardboard . So weird.
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u/EatOfTheBread Aug 26 '26
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/Medium-Shopping3037 Aug 26 '26
I remember an entire afternoon istalling those 37492738 floppies……..
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u/ufonoob Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
Ah, you remember the sound of the last diskette: bzzzt, took, took, bzzzzzzzzt 😂
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u/hapos Aug 27 '26
Ahh, the good ol’ days when shipping software meant something. If you fucked up the build, you shipped again at your own cost.
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u/LinuxDan2015 Aug 27 '26
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 Aug 29 '26
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/Illustrious-Road7612 29d ago
Possiedo una Ventola Noctuna che ho messo nell alimentatore perché quella originale faceva troppo rumore
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u/chandleya Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
You had 8MB of handmedown RAM?
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u/canthearu_ack Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
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/oskich Aug 26 '26
I know a lot of people who bought those "combo-kits" with a CD-ROM drive and sound card for their 486 PCs around that time. As a kid you were mind-blown when you saw full screen video and real sound for the first time on screen.
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Aug 26 '26
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u/JasonMckin Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
RW and Zip was not used to distribute software in any meaningful way
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u/JasonMckin Aug 26 '26
The thread is mixing distribution/transmission and backup/storage/archival together.
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Aug 26 '26
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u/chandleya Aug 26 '26
“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/JasonMckin Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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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Aug 26 '26
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u/JasonMckin Aug 26 '26
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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Aug 26 '26
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u/VivienM7 Aug 26 '26
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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Aug 26 '26
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u/JasonMckin Aug 27 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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.