Gates duped a lot fo people into buying into his vendor lock-in stranglehold back then. Have we learned anything ever since?

No lines since Win95, what does that tell you about subsequent MSFT products? Customer's dreading the upgrade path or they simply don't care because MSFT doesn't release anything worth getting excited about cause it's more of the same:

*patch
*reboot
*install AV, antispyware
*reboot
*pray you don't get an infection & have to reinstall windoze
*eventually have to reinstall windoze cause of the code rot

I vividly remember the mass hysteria about Windows 95. The lines of people desperate to buy that buggy OS. I used it as well and I certainly had my fair share of blue screens of death.

To expand on Maddog's insight, Windows 95 was good at the time of its announcement for two reasons:

1. It was good for users because it was the best platform at the time to run the most popular desktop applications at the lowest cost. It was a piece of garbage technically, but there were no alternatives except for higher-priced Apples, astronomically priced Unix workstations, and the quirky and geeky OS/2 which didn't really do any one thing particularly well. So another way of saying that it was the best desktop platform at the time is that it was the least horribly painful of any of the available alternatives. Monopolies can get away with that kind of thing.

2. It was good for Microsoft because it let them concentrate on hardware vendor, software vendor, and user lock-in. And their growing monopoly position (being the only real desktop platform) let them ignore bug fixes and continue to propagate the (foolish) notion that rebooting and reinstalling software is a natural thing to do.

But somewhere between the release of Word for Windows 2.0c and Word for Windows 6.0, Bill Gates' open admission that Microsoft doesn't fix bugs certainly got my attention. I could see the truth of it in the products that Microsoft released, but to hear Billy Gates freely and openly admit it removed all doubt that Microsoft was nothing more than a greedy users-be-damned monopoly that released crappy products and was proud of it.

Others must have felt the same reaction as I did, because the first low rumblings of Linux as a desktop operating system started not all that very long after. Yes, those rumblings were largely met with skepticism and derision (and still are, to a large degree). But this goal is fed with the human desire to be free to choose alternatives to high-priced and low-quality software. And despots throughout the ages have ignored the groundswell of the basic human desire for freedom at their own peril.

The way I remember it, Windows 95 was a huge advance over Windows 3.1. It made my computer faster at many tasks especially graphics-wise. It crashed a hell of a lot less and the crashes required a reboot less often. And the Internet support was pretty good - you really didn't want to run 16-bit Netscape Navigator, trust me.

Win95 was supposed to be a short term solution while Microsoft prepared NT for home users, unfortunately that didn't happen until 2001, a good 5 years or so after they had planned to switch.

Yes, Chris, that is also the way I remember it. But, a huge advance over Windows 3.1 in terms of capability and stability is not really much of a leap.

I found that AIX PS/2 and AIX on RS/6000 to provide a 100% rock-solid desktop, albeit without a few key office applications. The 32-bit Navigator ran beautifully. As an experiment, I found Emacs, LaTex, Ghostview, and a postscript-attached printer to provide a very nice desktop publishing environment. It was a bit on the uber-geek side, I admit. But it worked without a single crash or burp, provided 100% perfect print preview, and produced beautifully typeset documents (three things that the word processors of the time could not claim without lying).

And they showed just how far behind Windows was in terms of stability. And so, such a poorly constructed operating system as Windows 95 could not have existed without the monopolistic practices of its creator.

But with lower-cost Macs and much-lower-cost Linux nipping at their heels, Microsoft's inferiority in the areas of stability and security are becoming more and more glaring. No longer does everybody blindly compare a Microsoft Windows release against the previous release. Lots of folks still do, but not everyone anymore.

Wait a minute. Weezer has been around that long? I have watched the Good Times video on the CD. Joe is it the video to that song where characters emulate the characters from 'Happy Days'?

@Andre,
the happy days video from Weezer was for their "Buddy Holly" song. The album with that song on it was released in 1991. (yeah, it doesn't feel like it's been that long)

from the wikipedia entry for "Weezer":

"Jonze also directed the band's second video "Buddy Holly".[3] The video featured footage from the television sitcom Happy Days spliced with the band performing in a remade "Arnold's Diner", a familiar setting from the series.[6] The video achieved heavy rotation on MTV[7] and went on to win Jonze and the band four MTV Video Music Awards, including Breakthrough Video and Best Alternative Music Video, and two Billboard Music Video Awards.[8] The clip is also featured on the installation CD for the Microsoft Windows 95 computer operating system."

@ Andre,
sorry that should read: "The album with that song on it was released in 1994"

For me it was NT4sp4 and finally Windows 2000 that was the defining moment for MS. It as amazing how different a non SP NT4 and NT4sp4 was.

All of us used to dual boot NT4 for everything and Win98 for games.

Finally an OS that could do both - XP was just the icing on the cake.

Win 95 wasn't so much buggy as the 486 PCs quality control was terrible(especially the RAM). I remember everyone blaming Win 95 when their PC ran Win 3.1 just fine and I'd replace their RAM and it fixed it.

The other major issue was that Win 95 let applications run all over it. Developers without proper training would write crap(what's changed, I know) and hanging became common - NT4 took care of that. And then there's Windows bloat, uninstall was always an afterthought.

Buggy device drivers for crap hardware du jour didn't help either. Motherboards with everything built on them weren't around for anything but the SIS video chips.

Things have sure changed...

Thanks for the info Al. I also remember playing the game off the CD called Hover. Great memories.

In Windows versions up to 3.x, software configuration info used to be stored in .INI files. Unfortunately, Microsoft neglected to mandate standardized locations for keeping these files, so they ended up scattered all over the system.

In Dimdows 95, Microsoft introduced the Registry as a centralized location for storing configuration information. Unfortunately, this also became a single point of failure for the whole system.

Windows 95? At the time, I was blissfully unaware of its existence. If I HAD known about it, I could not have cared less.

Joe;

The videos are a hit, I love the one about the Mac and the guy escolating in his frustration and rage. I own a HP Blackbird 002 and a top of the line Mac Pro Quad Processor with the latest operating system on both of them. I am writing on the Blackbird right now.

I guess I can definately agree with the angry Mac user and some of the other videos pertaining to the "untruths" of Mac. I also have the lastest version of Ubuntu on another quad-core machine and I get into that too. So you see, they all "break down" now and then, the OS's that is, well except for my Vista. It doesn't fail as much as the others right now, and Ubuntu is second best as far as stability is concerned, but it has far less applications on that one.

I would like to say my Mac Pro rocks, yes it cost as much as my BlackBird, but with a less reliable operating system not to mention the features, it's use is primarily, though it seems, to find out the "real deal" about Apple. The only truly reliable Apple product I have is my iPod g-5 classic that I use on my PC. Seems that when I hook it up to my Mac, I tried transfering and transcoding music to it, somewhere between the Mac Prof and the iPod I loose my music files, and of course, this happens with other files in the "translation."

Again, I can relate to the Mac fellow loosing his cool. I get frustrated as the next guy with his computing and I "Know" the real truth about any of these OS's and their pitfalls -- Basic, nothing is perfect.