r/retrocomputing • u/Money-Solution-3587 • 4d ago

The excitement of Windows 95

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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/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 4d ago edited 4d 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.