X-Nico

16 unusual facts about Windows 95


Active Scripting

VBScript and JScript engines are included with the default installation of Windows versions after Windows 95, and are an optional install with CE.

Anita Harding

On learning of her terminal condition she is reported to have said "At least I won't have to buy Windows 95".

Bug!

It was later ported to Windows 3.x and Windows 95 on August 31, 1996 by Beam Software, on one CD that contains both versions of the game.

Computerra

The last issue cover lacks a usual cover image, with only the black rectangle instead and the words roughly translatable as "now you can shut down your computerra", as a pun on the shutdown image of Windows 95.

Errorwear

Exclusively dealing in error messages printed on shirts, Errorwear is best known for the "Blue Screen of Death" t-shirt, an all-blue shirt with the famous Windows 95 BSOD across the front.

Internet OS

Microsoft and Intel in response to this challenge put forward a standard for a competing model called the NetPC, a diskless PC that would be primarily adapted to web browser use and would run a simplified version of Windows 95, codenamed Pegasus.

J Allard

According to an internal email, Allard was a network engineer responsible for convincing Microsoft to ship TCP/IP in Windows 95.

Mark Malamud

In addition to designing the fundamental conceptual, user, and interaction models for Windows 95 and future versions of Windows NT, Mr. Malamud also pursued future user interface abstractions.

Microsoft Office 95

True to its namesake, this suite is designed specifically for Windows 95.

Picture Perfect Morning

The video for Good Times was included as part of the multimedia samples included on Microsoft's Windows 95 Companion CD-ROM.

Portable application

Whereas many Windows programs assume the user is an administrator—something very prevalent in the days of Windows 95/98/ME (and to some degree in Windows XP/2000, though not in Windows Vista or Windows 7)—such would quickly result in "Permission denied" errors in Unix-like environments since users will be in an unprivileged state much more often.

Pradeep Singh

Pradeep Singh founded Aditi Technologies in 1994 after nine years in management positions at Microsoft, including General Manager of the Windows 95 mobile services group.

Pregap

This method was quickly made obsolete in late 1996 when an update to Windows 95 in driver SCSI1HLP.VXD made the pregap track inaccessible.

SwordSearcher

When Windows 95 was released, version 3 was released as a Windows program called SwordSearcher 95 and was apparently the first 32 bit Windows Bible Software available.

TerraTopia

It was quite often a standard issue game on most computers that came equipped with Windows 95 in the mid to late 1990s.

Virginia Howlett

She led the team that designed the 3D graphic interface for Windows 95.


Aditi Technologies

Pradeep Singh founded Aditi Technologies in 1994 after nine years in management positions at Microsoft, including General Manager of the Windows 95 mobile services group.

ASCII Ribbon Campaign

Following the development of Microsoft Windows 95, standards adherents became annoyed that they were receiving email in HTML and non-human-readable formats.

AutoIt

While version 1 and 2 were compatible with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and Windows 7, support for operating systems older than Windows 2000 was discontinued with the release of v3.3.0 in December 2008).

Borland Turbo Debugger

The original 1.0 release of Turbo Debugger for MS-DOS will run under simple MS-DOS emulators (DOSEMU, in an MS-DOS Window in Windows 95, 2000, etc.) The later versions attempt to control the underlying machine in a way not allowed by the host operating system (in which the emulator is running) and therefore do not work.

Matrox Simple Interface

Matrox Simple Interface (in short MSI) is the name of a proprietary DOS and Windows 95 application programming interface for Matrox Mystique graphics cards made by Matrox.

Microsoft Minesweeper

From Windows 95 onwards, the Explorer shell prevented this from working, but it would still work if another shell is used instead.

NJStar Communicator

NJStar Communicator was a very popular Traditional Chinese Microsoft Windows add-on for Windows 95 and Windows 98 that supports Chinese, Japanese and Korean input and web pages viewing in the same windows before Windows provided those functions.

NoteWorthy Composer

NoteWorthy Composer (NWC) is a graphical score editor for Microsoft Windows computers (from Windows 95 to Windows 7), and is also reported to work on PCs under Linux with Wine.

Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol

All releases of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95 OSR2 are bundled with a PPTP client, although they are limited to only 2 concurrent outbound connections.

Win32s

Win32s included an implementation of the card game FreeCell as an example application, a couple of years before the game became famous with its inclusion in Windows 95.