A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Windows 95 shipped 10 years ago today

Microsoft News Tracker — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 18:04:43 GMT

Today is Windows 95&#8217;s 10th anniversary. A start on the likely tsunami of reminiscences from Joe Wilcox, Craig Rowland, and at The Old New Thing [1], [2].

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re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

JenK — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 18:39:50 GMT

That had slipped my mind...but yup, that was 10 years ago today. I was in the yellow t-shirt section* with my friend Betsy.

And, naturally, they played "Start Me Up" while the inside-the-tent crowd was heading between the bleachers to the midway. So we danced and laughed and clapped to that song over and over and over.

I wasn't too surprised by the midway til I saw the Ferris Wheel. Funny how working there can raise your expectations (remember the company party with the merry-go-round inside the convention center? ;)

I remember a reporter asking me very hesitantly if my t-shirt meant I was on the Windows dev team.

*We were organized into a "living Windows flag", so there were red, blue, green, and yellow sections.

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Danny — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:09:22 GMT

I was another one of the product team members who won that lottery. Unlike Raymond, I decided to watch it from within the tent. While it was very exciting there, I knew from that day that I'd made the wrong decision.

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Matt — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:11:21 GMT

After reading this little gem I just can't wait to see what Microsoft comes up with for the Vista release!

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Al — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:52:27 GMT

As I have for the last 5 or 6 years, I'm having a "birthday party" for Windows95 today. For real. I know that sounds totally nuts (and it probably is to some degree), but Windows95 took us all out of the dark ages and into the new frontier. Me and my co-coders will get some cake and soda and play "Start Me Up" from a Win95 CD... Nerds at their worst... I mean best.

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

BTX — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 20:18:22 GMT

...amazing, as it is amazing to hear all of you guys stories about how you took every single bug to heart to get to what we have today

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

vince — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:04:35 GMT

C:\NGRTLNS.W95

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

DavidKlineMS — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:19:46 GMT

Funny you mention unused Win95 launch tickets. I believe I have mine also (I prefered to be with the team too).

T+10 years: Windows 95

David Kline — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:41:59 GMT

Ten years ago, as Raymond has mentioned, the Windows 95 team was hiding backstage at the launch event.&nbsp;...

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Daev — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 22:58:13 GMT

This tenth anniversary is a good time to point out what a great design the Windows 95 team came up with. 16-bit, 32-bit, and Ring 0 code was deeply intertwingled to produce a system that supported real DOS, Win16, and Win32 programs equally well. To applications written for each subsystem the OS appeared to be a new, compatible version of the architecture they expected.

For example, 16-bit USER and GDI components drew on the 32-bit heap via a table of indirect handles, and the core kernel functionality (VMM.VXD and VWIN32.VXD) understood the structure of the 16-bit and 32-bit kernel modules; each level had its own internal database records that were carefully kept in sync by an intricate network of thunks, system calls, and mutexes. The result was a design in which unmodified Windows 3 and even DOS programs were first-class citizens within a 32-bit OS, unlike their limited status in the NT/2000/XP series.

There were certainly problems with the implementation that had to be hammered out over time: the Win16 mutex was held in a lot of unnecessary places, 32-bit code thunked a whole lot more often than it needed to, and who knows what the heck was up with the weird INT 30H mechanism (the way protected mode code called the OS kernel involved some kind of secret internal address translation lookup table). But on the whole it was a triumph of the "big complex system" approach to OS design as described in Richard Gabriel's famous "Worse Is Better" article (on what's wrong with Unix): http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html . The Windows 95 developers solved very hard problems in a remarkable way.

Win95 reminds me most of the "Soul Of A New Machine" architecture, from Tracy Kidder's book on the development of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. "Wide" and "narrow" versions of everything existed side-by-side on that machine, so that no matter what sort of code you wrote, it interoperated with everything else. Neither the Eagle nor Windows 95 may make it into academic case studies of OS design, but they were both elegant engineering solutions.

Recommended reading: "Windows 95 System Programming Secrets" by the inimitable Matt Pietrek.

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Fred Fenster — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 00:59:31 GMT

Raymond, I'm sure this has been covered before, but I was just wondering what you do now? Are you working on Vista and can you say specifically what you are working on?

Just curious.

Microsoft Windows 95 a 10 ans... Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 souffle aussi sa 10e bougie d'anniversaire

Jean-Luc Raymond — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:50:44 GMT

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

James Schend — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:54:08 GMT

>Windows95 took us all out of the dark ages and
>into the new frontier.

Just you PC users. ;) What's MacOS 7? Chopped liver?

Microsoft Windows 95 a 10 ans... Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 souffle aussi sa 10e bougie d'anniversaire

Jean-Luc Raymond — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:54:47 GMT

Microsoft Windows 95 a 10 ans... Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 souffle aussi sa 10e bougie d'anniversaire

Jean-Luc Raymond — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:54:49 GMT

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Anon — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 11:24:22 GMT

>Just you PC users. ;) What's MacOS 7? Chopped?>liver?

What the hell is a MAC fan doing here ? get outta here.

Microsoft Windows 95 a 10 ans... Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 souffle aussi sa 10e bougie d'anniversaire

Jean-Luc Raymond — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:53:58 GMT

Windows 95 Ten Years Later

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 16:24:28 GMT

Windows 95 Ten Years Later

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 17:38:34 GMT

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Michael J. — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 01:50:22 GMT

After reading Andrew Shulman's Undocumented Windows95, Win 3.11 For Workgroups seemed like a bigger step forward than Win95. In Win3.11 filesystem was entirely controller from 32-bit protected mode. Win95 was "downgraded" in order to maintain better compatibility with older hardware and software, including popular at that time on-the-fly disk compressors. Afaik, these improvements came back in OSR2 along with FAT32.

re: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Scott — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 23:53:43 GMT

Speaking as a consumer and not a programmer, Win95 was quite a leap forward. However, that nasty DOS code was still a mess for people like me, who wanted to use nothing but 32 bit apps and longed for a real 32 bit OS. And a system that wouldn't run out of "system resources" and lock up every 24 hours.

Freankly, I was more excited about Windows 2000 than 95.

Heck, I only made it to XP about 8 months ago.

10 Years at Microsoft

Andy Pennell's Blog — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:24:19 GMT

I started at Microsoft the day after Labour Day, 1995 (which I soon learned was spelled Labor Day)....

Steve Wozniak at Microsoft

All the Cool Developers use Speech APIs — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 01:18:32 GMT

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