Windows 95

online emulator

Microsoft Windows 95: First Retail Release (pcjs.com) It is shown running below, following a “Compact Installation” on a 68Mb hard disk. Before the machine can start, it must download the disk image, which may take a minute or two, depending on the speed of your internet connection.

Why is there a screen that says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”? (devblogs.microsoft.com) I don’t know whose idea it was, but Windows 95 added a screen that appeared when you shut down Windows.
Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? (devblogs.microsoft.com) Twitter users @tthirtle asked why Windows 95 setup goes through three operating systems: MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and then Windows 95. Why not go from MS-DOS straight to Windows 95?
Were there any Windows 3.1 programs that were so incompatible with Windows 95 that there was no point trying to patch them? (devblogs.microsoft.com) In a comment to my discussion of the Windows 95 patch system, commenter word merchant wondered whether there were any Windows 3.1 programs or drivers that were so incompatible with Windows 95 that there was no point trying to patch them.

Windows 95 (Wikipedia) Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1, and was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995, almost three months after the release of Windows NT 3.51. Windows 95 is the first version of Microsoft Windows to include the Modern Windows Feel (Taskbar, Start Menu.) Windows 95 merged Microsoft’s formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified “plug-and-play” features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture, at least when running only 32-bit protected mode applications.