Windows 95 has been one of the most important operating systems in Microsoft history. For the first time, the graphical user interface came to the fore, but it was still present under the old MS-DOS.

The architecture and design of this operating system were characterized, among other things, by: an asynchronous input/output (I/O) subsystem: If a user or application performs an operation with the file system, such as copying a file, the behavior of the operating system was a matter of curiosity.

Windows 95 can put other tasks to “sleep” until this process is finished, allowing other applications to run rather than wasting processor cycles by asking if the file operation has finished.

As explained on Stack Exchange many years ago, the reason for this is not clear, but the limited capabilities of low-end computers likely caused Windows 95 to accumulate I/O completion messages (a feature apparently inherited from Windows NT), making Windows 95 Didn’t wake up right away. Applications for the continuation of these processes. What the system did was to wake up the input application from user devices, resulting in fluidity and good response times.

This exactly caused an interesting indirect effect: if the user moves the mouse during file copyingThis process was carried out faster. At the time, they explained that large applications that took an hour to install “can reduce those times to up to a quarter of an hour with a convenient movement of the mouse.”

It is currently much more difficult to appreciate the effect of quickly moving the mouse to speed up certain operations, but there are situations where we can take advantage of it. For example, when selecting a lot of text in the browser or editor, if we quickly move the mouse downwards from side to side while selecting that text, the selection will go down faster.

As with previous versions of Windows, it’s all about the way the operating system manages the message queue. When you move the mouse, messages related to that movement do not stop coming, which causes other programs to wake up more frequently and react faster.

Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen addressed this behavior in a technical text where he discussed a system feature related to the problem. Dr. Developers such as Kevin Purcell noted that something similar occurred on IBM mainframes and VM/370 terminals: pressing the space bar allocated extra CPU time, speeding up the execution of FORTRAN programs.

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