This operating system launched by Microsoft 25 years ago has also changed the course of the entire industry.

Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Sanyi Life” (ID: IT-3eLife), Author SanyiBacteria.

On August 25, 1995, Beijing time, an operating system that had been announced many times before officially announced the completion of its development and the release to manufacturing (RTM) news. On this night, many users who heard the news began to spontaneously line up at the door of the software store, waiting for the moment when the operating system, which is destined to create a new era of PC, will be officially launched.

In fact, this software is indeed underdeveloped in that era, and consumers still need to go to offline stores to buy CDs (or disks), setting an amazing record of 7 million copies sold five weeks before the launch. .

Yes, this is Microsoft Windows 95. As recognized as one of the most successful operating systems in the history of modern PCs, Windows 95 is often mentioned by everyone for its achievements, including the amazing sales at its first launch, the first start menu design that leads future generations, and of course, it opened up Microsoft’s “domination.” The era significance of the PC operating system market.

For today’s domestic IT industry, Windows 95 may be the first good impression many people have when they first come into contact with a PC. But even so, there may not be many friends who really know this epoch-making operating system 25 years ago, let alone those anecdotes and little secrets about it. Therefore, on this memorable day, we at Sanyi Life would like to use this article to pay tribute to this epoch-making software that has opened countless people’s interest in computers.

  • First of all, WindoWS 95 was once considered “not an operating system”

Although we all admit now, Windows 95 is definitely an important milestone in the history of the PC operating system. But did you know that, not long after Windows 95 came on the market, there was a discussion about whether it counts as an operating system in the academic world.

Why is this happening? This is because Windows 95 is actually a “hybrid operating system” in essence, it has its own 32-bit kernel and 32-bit drivers, but at the same time, inside Windows 95, it also runs one or more 16-bit DOS underlying components. They are not only responsible for the loading of the operating system when the computer is turned on, but even when the user starts any 32-bit application on Windows 95, DOS will also be started at the bottom layer and used to initialize some key data required by the program.

windowed command line tool for modern Windows

Not only that, many friends may know that today’s Windows operating system still retains a special operation interface called “command line tool”. But the “command line tools” in modern Windows are actually just a text interface that looks like DOS. They are essentially a 64-bit Windows operating system (so they cannot run 16-bit DOS software).

But Windows 95 is different. Its “DOS mode” is really a 16-bit DOS operating system. You can run all DOS software here, but you cannot run Windows programs.

Then the question is, is Windows 95 really “not an operating system”? To understand this, you first need to know that before Windows 95, Microsoft’s Windows 1.0~Windows 3.2 are a “graphical user interface” that must be installed with DOS before starting from DOS.

From this point of view, the earliest Windows is indeed not an “operating system.” But Windows 95 is different. It can be installed directly on a brand new blank computer hard disk. At the same time, it has its own independent software runtime library, which can run 32-bit programs and some 3D games that DOS does not support. Obviously it is a qualified and complete “operating system”.

As for the fact that Windows 95 still runs a set of DOS at the bottom, it may not be understood at the time, but it is not surprising at all. After all, multi-kernel operating system, now It has long been uncommon.

  • Win96, Win97, behind these pirated systems are Microsoft’s sincerity

Maybe some users now can’t imagine what a grand occasion it would be like when foreigners lined up on the street to buy Windows 95 in 1995. Thinking about it now, that kind of surprise is probably not weaker than when we first started contacting computers at that time, when we saw “Windows 96” and “Windows 97” in the dim computer city.

Long time, poor resolution

What are Windows 96 and Windows 97? In fact, some friends should know that Microsoft’s Windows 9x series has only released three official versions of Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows me. Therefore, from an official point of view, “Win96” and “Win97” are definitely problematic titles, or to put it more bluntly, it is the consequence of pirates arbitrarily choosing names.

But does it mean that these two operating systems do not exist? It’s really not. becauseThe spare driver for new and old hardware devices. In order to facilitate the new hardware that consumers urgently need can basically keep working even when there is no network.

From the perspective of operating system programming, the massive amount of spare drives certainly occupies a lot of disk space and is even considered to affect the stability of the system. But if Microsoft abandons the “Plug and Play” design that it has adhered to since Windows 95, and changes it to macOS or some Linux systems that only support the latest hardware for a period of time, everyone’s opinion may be It’s bigger~ (laugh).