It seems incredible that 27 years (and a few months) have passed since the launch of Windows 95, during that warm August of the year that, of course, bears this iconic version of Microsoft’s operating system under its own name. To this day, there are still debates about whether it was really a graphical operating system or, on the contrary, the operating system was still MS-DOS and all the graphical part was just a plus, like the icing that turns a cupcake into a cupcake.

The thing is, Microsoft, already a software giant but a fraction of what it is today, knew what was at stake with such a big release. The default graphical interface, and also much friendlier than that provided by Windows 3.1 and its predecessors, was intended to bring computing closer to non-professional users, following the steps taken by Apple a decade earlier with the introduction of the first MacIntosh.

A few months ago, we remembered the Windows 95 presentation event thanks to a recently released video from it. A time capsule in the history of technology, as defined by my colleague Juan, which surely reminded all of us who have already combed the grays of how we lived that moment. In my case, the start day coincided with getting the “white” and returning home. Again, only the gray-haired will know what I mean, and I remember hearing the launch announcement on mainstream radio in the car. I still remember the surprise of hearing that news along with news about politics, economy, culture, etc.

The fact that Windows 95 is still fondly remembered by many users despite its defects is something that is confirmed by the verification that interesting tests are still being carried out with them today and that current commercial programs offer us to bathe in nostalgia restoring part of the elements of their graphical interface and its design. And, as we will tell you below, also revealing the most interesting data about its “guts”.

Can you imagine a current game with such an interface? Well, more than one of us have burned our eyelashes while playing titles like the first SimCity, which you can see in this picture. Of course, this is a specific version for Windows 95.

Today in Ars Technica we can read that one of Microsoft’s absolute priorities with regard to the launch of Windows 95 was its compatibility with third-party software, including games. It reached the point, according to what is said in the said publication, that «the Windows 95 development manager “took his truck, drove to the local Egghead Software store (when Egghead still existed) and bought a copy of every PC program in the store”. All were responsible for up to two programs that they installed, ran, and documented errors. If the employee ended up with two, they could go back and take two more. And what they finished, the evaluators could keep.»

During these tests, of course, certain compatibility problems were detected, before which Microsoft decided to be proactive and integrate a solution to work properly in Windows 95. In the case of SimCity, which was a huge sales success in its time (and when I think of how such a historical saga ended…), the Windows 3.x version was found to commit, when running on beta versions of Windows 95, a bug in to memory access management, a bug that caused the game to not work on the operating system.

And what did Microsoft do? Well, add a specific feature to the operating system that detected if SimCity was running and, if so, modified its own memory management system to suit SimCity’s needs. Thus, although Maxis later released a Windows 95-specific version of SimCity, users who had the Windows 3.x version could continue to use it on the new operating system without issue.

Those were of course different times, just ten years later it would have been materially impossible to review the compatibility of Windows with all existing software, and even more so to develop and include in the operating system all the “fixes” necessary to make it work properly. But in spite of that, or because of that, it is so interesting to look back from time to time, to remember what the emerging industry was like a few decades ago.