It's (still) Windows 95's world. We just live in it.
Perhaps nothing symbolized the big, unpopular shifts more than Microsoft's decision to get rid of the beloved Start button. Most alpha and beta testers had assumed that the missing button would return in the final release; when it didn't, people immediately started coming up with replacements. Ordinary users hated its absence. Power users were still calling for its return two years later. When Windows 10 was released in 2015, the beloved menu was back.
Call it Windows 95's revenge.
[ In pictures: Windows through the ages ]
For all the fanfare that greeted its release, Windows 95 is somewhat notorious for not being a huge technical leap forward. Microsoft had originally planned the mid-'90s release of a definitively next-generation OS, code-named "Cairo," which they had been working on since 1991. But when it became clear that Cairo's technical underpinnings weren't going to be ready in time for Windows' needed refresh, much of the work that had already been done developing its user interace was brought over to the Windows 95 project.
Windows 95 did include the Win32 version of the Windows API, which was an important step towards unifying the consumer OS with Windows NT. It also included pre-emptive multi-tasking, which was a huge jump forward for a consumer OS but by no means revolutionary -- Unix had since its inception years before, as had Windows NT. And under the shiny new covers, the operating system was still layered over MS-DOS, just as its predecessor Windows 3.1 had been.
But those covers were not unimportant. And even though many techies tend to dismiss UI innovation as eye candy, the fact is that the changes made in Windows 95 were incredibly successful in making the the system more accessible to users -- so successful, in fact, that a surprising number of them have endured and even spread to other operating systems.
We still live in the world Windows 95 made. When I asked people on Twitter their thoughts about what aspects of Windows 95 have persisted, I think Aaron Webb said it best: "All of it Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly."
Let's start with that Start button. Credit for it goes to Danny Oran, a behavioral psychologist who had studied with with the famous B.F. Skinner. Among the projects he worked on with Skinner was a doomed attempt to teach chimpanzees to talk, for which he ended up building a sort of keyboard-like wooden frame. In the process, he learned that it was easiest to grasp UI elements sequentially, with an obvious starting point, and after watching test subjects (including a literal rocket scientist) struggle to figure out how to access Windows' features, he came up with the idea of a single button that led them to everything. Originally labelled "System," it eventually got the more user-friendly "Start."
Oran also came up with the idea that developed into the Taskbar along the bottom of the screen, though he originally envisioned it as a series of tabs along the top. This solved another fundamental problem of Windows 3.1: it was difficult to tell what programs were running at any given time, and users often would launch multiple instances of the same app.
A third important advance in the Windows 95 UI was a little less transformative, but important nonetheless. Windows 3.1 had featured a drop-down menu at the top left of each application window that provided a number of options as to what you could do with that windows; Windows 95 instead put three buttons at the top right, one for each of the most common actions: minimize, maximize, close. As with the Start button and the Taskbar, the goal was to make your options obvious, without you having to hunt for them. These three UI elements, all of which are still present in more or less identical form, may be Windows 95's greatest legacy to history.
At this point, as I extol Windows 95's landmark UI, I know that a certain segment of you are growing increasingly irate. I mean, of course, the Mac faithful, who 20 years ago joked that Windows 95 was Macintosh 87. Apple may not have invented the desktop computing metaphor, but they certainly refined and popularized it, and in this regard Windows 95 was definitely closer to what Mac users had enjoyed for years than it was to Windows 3.1's clumsy implementation.
And yet: I'm writing this article on my iMac running OS X Yosemite, and if I look to the top of the window into which I'm typing this text, I see three buttons, to close, minimize, or maximize the window. If I look to the bottom of the screen, I see the Dock, which lets me know what applications I'm running, and where I can stash minimized documents if I want. Neither of these features were present in System 7.5, the version of the Macintosh operating system shipping with new Macs in August of 1995.
At that point in Apple's history, the company was suffering its own OS crisis, even worse than the one Microsoft had gone through with Cairo. Copland, Apple's planned next-generation OS, was now all the more important to the company as it tried to keep up with Windows 95, but its ship date kept slipping further into the future.
In August of 1996, Apple killed the project, and by the end of the year had bought NeXT (bringing Steve Jobs back on board in the process) in order to use the Unix-based NeXTSTEP as its new OS. NeXTSTEP underwent a complete UI overhaul in order to become Mac OS X, and when the new operating system's Public Beta was released in 2000, it included the minimize/maximize/close buttons. The Dock was there too, and it was a particularly ironic borrowing: The reason Oran's original version of the Windows Taskbar was moved from the top to the btoom of the screen, it was rumored, was to avoid a lawsuit from Apple.
Windows 95 really did attempt to give its users better and simpler access to the powerful things their computers could do. This didn't always work -- the words "Windows Registry" will send many into a panic -- but there were successes. The Control Panel, for instance, served to consolidate many system settings into a single relatively easy-to-understand interface, and it remains largely unchanged today. (Apple also borrowed the idea for OS X.)
Windows had one challenge that Macs, with their more tightly controlled hardware ecosystem, didn't: working with a bewilderingly wide range of hardware cards and peripherals. Windows 95 pioneered device autodetection, which Microsoft dubbed "Plug and Play"; it didn't always live up to that promise, which gave rise to the phrase Plug and Pray." Still, Deepak Kumar, CTO of IT systems management provider Adaptiva, says that "a huge development in the history of Windows was the abstraction of hardware" that Plug and Play represented, and he praised the behind-the-scenes work the company did in reaching out to hardware vendors. "Since then," he says, "Windows ships with thousands of kernel drivers so users no longer need to know about hardware."
Windows 95 helped users install software as well, pioneering wizard-based installations that made the formerly inscrutable process easier to understand and complete. Even the process of installing Windows 95 itself was wizard-based, and visual step-by-step processes continue to be how most users on most platforms install software today, on Windows and other platforms.
To power all the graphical imagery in Windows 95, and to lure game developers away from DOS, Microsoft released the DirectX set of APIs, which soon came standard with the operating system. Developer adoption was slow, but DirectX was crucial to creating the current gaming environment, in which PCs compete with dedicated consoles for gamers' dollars.
"We make gaming computers and wouldn't be doing that if it weren't for Windows 95," says Tim Lynch, CEO of Psychsoftpc. "It was the first true graphical gaming platform with the introduction of DirectX and games such as Hover, Pitfall (think Lara Croft), Al Unser Jr. Arcade Racing, Battle Beast, NBA Full Court Press, Havoc, and Diablo, all of which defined genres of games. Without Windows 95 there would be no Steam or Xbox and we would still be playing Pong."
Users in 1995 at least knew that games were available for their PCs; many of them were only vaguely aware that they could connect to the Internet. Windows 95 wasn't the first operating system to ship with TCP/IP -- Macintosh System 7.5 had beat Microsoft to the punch by a little more than a year -- but Microsoft was the first to recognize the crucial importance of the Web browser.
Internet Explorer didn't technically ship with the initial consumer version of Windows 95; it came with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, a separately sold add-on that many people coveted more for its desktop themes than its Internet tools. But most OEMs that shipped computers preinstalled with Windows 95 bundled Microsoft Plus! from the get-go, and soon it was a standard part of any Windows 95 install.
This was another instance of Windows 95 defining what we expected out of a computer: the idea that it wouldn't include a browser out of the box, for free, quickly became unthinkable, and this destroyed Netscape's entire business strategy. Even though it led to litigation, the world we live in now, in which even third-party browsers are free of charge as a matter of course, was created by Microsoft's Windows 95 plans.
The Mac again was a laggard in this regard, and after playing catch-up by briefly bundling Netscape Navigator, Apple eventually signed an agreement with its arch-nemesis in 1997 that saw Internet Explorer set as the Mac's bundled, default browser for the next five years. But this was part of a larger investment in Apple by Microsoft that, perversely, was specifically designed to prop up Redmond's long-time rival.
Which brings us to the final way in which we're living in Windows 95's world. It's easy to see our modern computers' genesis in Windows 95's UI or Internet capabilities. But 1995 was still full of the echoes of the previous computer age. Remember, the gaming platform DirectX was supposed to be luring developers away from was DOS. Commodore was still selling PCs. Computer labs across the country were still full of Apple II's. And IBM, still a poweful player in the PC industry, was pushing its own operating system, OS/2.
Windows 95 was a juggernaut that snuffed that world out for good. It "had a significant impact on the market by eliminating the use of MS-DOS and OS/2," says Thomas Koll, a former Microsoft executive who's now the CEO of software developer Laplink. By 1997, Windows 95's victory was so total that Microsoft was giving money to its competition just to avoid being deemed a monopoly by the government (as noted, it didn't work).
Today, Windows still has a better than 90 percent share of the desktop market. To defeat Windows 95 and its spiritual descendents, Microsoft's opponents had to invent whole new computing platforms. The PC, unsexy commodity though it may be, is still Microsoft's kingdom.